Golf Club Wasteland

Genre: Sports (Golf)

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Untold Tales)

(Note: This game is a part of the Golf Club Wasteland / Aspire: Ina’s Tale Bundle, along with Aspire: Ina’s Tale. It is also included in Golf Club Nostalgia & The Cub Bundle, along with The Cub.)

Golf Club Wasteland (later renamed to Golf Club Nostalgia) is a Side-Scrolling Golf game released on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2021. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic future where the wealthiest of the wealthiest of Earth’s residents have fled the planet to live on Mars in order to escape a global catastrophe, and who now return to play golf in Earth’s ruins, making literal sport out of the suffering of millions. Golf Club Wasteland is not coy about the symbolic nature of this act, as this game is just as much a social satire as it is a golf game.

Golf Club Wasteland’s 2D visuals are simple but visually engrossing, with plenty of little details to draw in players and get them curious to learn more about the calamity that befell Earth, as well as the culture that preceded that disaster. Players will be golfing in the hazy ruins of a once-great city with buildings fallen to ruin, broken-down tanks sitting in childrens’ playgrounds, and neon signs still lit up in the background for companies like Covfefe, Hipster Pubes, and Silicon Vallium. In the foreground, you can see the blurry shadows of scurrying rats and mysterious human-like figures, and overall the picture this paints is quite a vivid one.

Having said that, the slightly-skewed perspective of the visuals can interfere with the gameplay at times, as it makes it difficult to see where the edges of the terrain are, where the background ends and where your ball will collide with the scenery. This is largely a mild annoyance, but one worth mentioning regardless.

While I overall like the this game’s visuals, it is the sound that really stands out here. As players golf, their spacesuit-wearing, jetpack-using golfer will make amusing vocalizations as he grumbles at missing a shot or lets out a nervous “woah” when stepping on unstable ground. However, even more noteworthy than this is the in-game radio station, Radio Nostalgia, which intersperses announcements and commentary by the station’s calm-voiced deejay, listener-submitted stories about life on mars and memories of Earth prior to The Great Catastrophe, and music with some nice chill tunes from various genres. Each of these elements adds a great deal to this game.

From the deejay, you’ll get helpful instructions about recycling human waste and instructions about how to adjust to the changes in timekeeping on Mars, as well as advertisements for the drink O-Mass, which is spoken of in a tones of one describing a pacifying drug survivors are addicted to just to tolerate their day-to-day lives. From listener-submitted stories, you get a real feel for the continuing hubris of the last survivors of humanity whining about the luxuries of Earth they miss as one imagines untold millions of people they left behind to die. And from the music, you get some really excellent relaxed and emotional tunes like Take My Hand and nice beats like Repetition (which I sadly cannot find a link for). Between all of this you really get this great feeling of sadness for what’s been lost, paired with the cynical selfishness of those who remain

While Golf Club Wasteland gives players some subtly nuanced world building, when it comes to the gameplay, the game is fairly simple in its mechanics – use the left stick to aim, right stick to move around the camera, L and R buttons to zoom in and out, and A to hit the ball. That’s it. Players use the left stick to control both the angle of their swing and its power.

Really, most of the complexity in this game comes from the courses themselves, which start out fairly simple and straightforward, and gradually grow to Mini-Golf levels of silly convoluted designs that have you hitting buttons to turn on machines, riding elevators, and avoiding getting your ball eaten by squirrels or cows with glowing pink udders. The course design in this game can really get players to think through just how they’re supposed to get from point A to point B, and at its best the game can almost feel like a Puzzle game in this regard.

Unfortunately, a number of issues combine to make this game far more difficult than it needs to be. Firstly, while players are given a gauge that shows the relative angle and strength of their shot, there’s not much indication how this translates into the actual trajectory your ball will take, making it very difficult to judge how your ball will travel when you hit it. Given the increasingly convoluted courses, this can at times result in you inadvertently sending your ball farther back than when you took your shot, or even falling down from a high platform you went to great effort to climb up to.

This problem is made worse by the complete lack of any option to undo or retry a shot, even if you’d be happy to take a stroke penalty to do so. This means that if you find yourself misjudging a shot toward the end of a difficult course, you may well have no other option but to start over from the beginning.

Because of the issues with its mechanics and high difficulty, I find myself coming to the conclusion that Golf Club Wasteland is an unusual case of a sports game that should definitely be played… but for its story and atmosphere, not its gameplay. If all you’re looking for is a fun game of Golf, this may not be the game for you. But if you like the sound of a game that uses Golf as a jumping-off point for some really incisive social commentary, you’ll find this game well worth a look.

tl;dr – Golf Club Wasteland is a game that has players taking the role of a spacesuit-clad golfer playing through 2D Side-Scrolling courses in the post-apocalyptic ruins of Earth. The game’s social commentary is absolutely fantastic, bolstered by an in-game radio that gives an amusing look at the lives of humanity’s survivors. Unfortunately, the Golf gameplay is lacking by comparison, overly difficult and unforgiving, and too difficult to gauge where your shot will go. If you can tolerate these flaws, the excellent presentation and satire is more than worth giving this game a try, but this is not a game to get if your primary interest is the Golf itself.

Grade: C+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2021 Game Awards:

Winner:

Best Song (Take My Hand by Ana Curcin) – This is another one I went back and forth on, with the top three songs here swapping positions multiple times as I was considering this award. In the end, I landed on Take My Hand because the entire emotional tone of the game shifts on this one song. Golf Club Wasteland’s biting satire could have easily come across as purely humorous with its neon Covfefe signs and cows with glowing radioactive udders, but Take My Hand’s quiet, almost pleading tone prompts the player to contemplate the truly massive loss that brought everything to this ridiculous point, revealing that Golf Club Wasteland, as absurd as it may seem, is not a comedy, it is a tragedy. I should note that this song predates the game and was originally released in 2018, but the soulful mix included in this game gives it new meaning, so when Ana Curcin sings “All I know is that we shouldn’t be sad/when we think of the road ahead”, it sounds like someone trying to convince themselves of those words, against all evidence to the contrary.

Runner-Up: Best Sound Design, Best Story, Best Sports Game

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