Pocket Mini Golf 2

Genre: Sports (Mini-Golf)

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

Pocket Mini Golf 2 is a Mini-Golf game released in 2009 on iOS, ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022, then ported to PlayStation 4 in 2023, then to PC in 2024. As a reminder, when I reviewed the first Pocket Mini Golf, I thought the gameplay was decent but unspectacular, the presentation worked but was boring and unambitious, and the game was tainted by the remnants of its mobile past, where continuing when you failed in the game was tied to what was clearly intended as a premium currency. I can thankfully say that Pocket Mini Golf 2 has addressed these issues quite nicely.

Let’s start with the presentation. Pocket Mini Golf 2’s 3D visuals are colorful, detailed, and imaginative, with a lot of variety in the game’s four different themed worlds. Courses still take place against a flat, featureless void, but now the plots of land the courses rest on have all sorts of interesting things going on, with large animated fish swimming around in the game’s opening aquarium world, and some decent lighting in the game’s nighttime garden world. It’s still nothing technically impressive, but it’s far more visually-interesting this time around.

These visuals are joined by some really nice themes that fit each of these locales, though I’m sorry to say that while these are nice, they’re undercut by fanfare music when you complete each level that sounds like it came from a public domain library of fanfare music for mobile games. In fact, the game’s menus all bear the signs of being designed for a mobile interface, which really detracts from what is otherwise a pretty high-quality presentation.

Another improvement here is that the vestiges of disgusting monetization are almost entirely gone here. You’ll still be collecting gems as you play through the game’s levels, but these are no longer tied to your continued progression. Instead, they’re spent to play a “mini-game” level to earn power-ups. I suppose this is still a little shady, but I don’t think these power-ups are at all required to play through the game, so this is absolutely an improvement.

Oddly, the one area I don’t think is improved is the core gameplay itself. The prior game had a sensible “pull back and release” style of gameplay that I compared to Angry Birds, and that’s gone here, replaced by a shot direction and power indicator. I do like how players are given the option to curve that indicator by adding spin to their ball, which is a nice addition. Unfortunately, controlling the direction and power of your shot is really fiddly, still requiring you to press in the opposite direction of the shot, even though the rubber band-like physics are no longer present. It makes the controls unnecessarily unwieldy, and while you can still pretty easily work around this, it’s a real shame that this game actually makes the controls worse than the prior game.

Still, even with the control issues, Pocket Mini Golf 2 is a solid Mini-Golf game with some clever level design, overall good gameplay, a good presentation, and the removal of pretty much everything that detracted from the previous game. It’s a shame this comes with worse controls, but if you’re patient enough to work with these awkward controls, I think you’ll find this to be a pretty good entry in the genre, especially for its low $5 price tag.

tl;dr – Pocket Mini Golf 2 is a Mini Golf game that improves on its predecessor quite a bit, fixing much of what was wrong in the prior game. Unfortunately, it also changes the controls, making them worse. However, despite this issue, this is still overall a good budget Mini-Golf game, and fans of this sort of game should find this to their liking.

Grade: B-

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