Pocket Mini Golf

Genre: Sports (Mini Golf)

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local Alternating)

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Review:

Pocket Mini Golf is a simple Mini Golf game, originally released to Smartphones in April 2019 and brought over to the Nintendo Switch nearly a year later, and it is a game that definitely plays very much like a mobile-style game, with players pulling back on the control stick to determine the strength and direction the ball is struck, or doing so using the Nintendo Switch touchscreen.

The presentation here is fine, albeit simple and unambitious. The courses are all simplistic and shown against a flat void. It’s a clean look, but nothing that’s going to impress anyone. This is paired with a forgettable soundtrack.

The gameplay here is decent, with the Angry Birds-esque “pull back and release” mechanic a decent fit for this style of golf, although there is a bit of nuance in that players can move the angle over further to put some added spin on the ball.

However, while I like the gameplay here, the game’s structure is frustrating, with no ability to select your course (or just about anything, really – this game is very Spartan in its options), and if you don’t make par in a hole, you either need to spend “gems” earned through play, or be booted back to the first hole to start over again.

It’s pretty obvious that this is a holdover from the mobile game, where gems were undoubtedly sold via real currency to make money through microtransactions, and while players aren’t being asked to fork over more money here, the game’s structure is still crippled by this design choice all the same.

In the end, Pocket Mini Golf both lives by its mobile-style game design and dies by it. The gameplay here is simple, and could make for a nice distraction, but unfortunately the overarching game design still bears the frustrating hallmark of a game designed around microtransactions, even if those microtransactions aren’t present here. Gamers looking for a simple Mini Golf game may still find some fun to be had here, but most are better off without having to deal with this game’s frustrations.

tl;dr – Pocket Mini Golf is a Mini Golf game originally released to Smartphones, and its mobile design is very apparent here, both in its simple, satisfying gameplay, but also in its broken game progression designed around a microtransaction system that’s no longer present in the game. The result is a game with decent gameplay that’s too frustrating to provide more than a brief distraction.

Grade: C-

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