Dog Gone Golfing

Genre: Sports (Golf)

Players: 1-8 Competitive (Alternating)

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Review:

Dog Gone Golfing is a Golf Game where players try to get a ball to a hole on one of various side-view 2D golf courses. This game was released on PC in 2017 before being ported to PlayStation 4 in 2018 and eventually making it to the Nintendo Switch in 2020.

The presentation for Dog Gone Golfing uses pixel art 2D visuals that are decent without being anything especially noteworthy. There are a few cute animations, but overall there’s nothing extraordinary going on here. The same goes for the soundtrack, which uses chiptune music that’s not bad, but not memorable.

As for the game itself, what you have here is probably about what you’d expect from a side-view golf game – players try to judge the trajectory to hit the ball (er… puck) so as to get it to the hole. It’s nothing new or original, but it’s a solid formula that’s worked well before. However, here it has a problem – the game doesn’t tell you what angle your strike will send the shot. There’s no visual cue, no degree – just a number showing the power of your projected hit, without any practical implication just what that means for your shot. As a result, gauging your shot involves guesswork just as much as it does skill.

If it wasn’t for the lack of an indicator of your shot’s angle, Dog Gone Golfing would be a decent but unspectacular 2D side-view Golf game. Unfortunately, this poor design choice means that this is a game that requires too much guesswork to be anything satisfying for more than a cursory look. Skip it.

tl;dr – Dog Gone Golfing is a side-view Golf game where players try to judge the trajectory of their shot. Unfortunately, actually doing so seems more about guesswork than skill due to a lack of indication just what angle your shot will head off in. Because of this, what would have been a mediocre Golf game turns into a frustrating one.

Grade: C-

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