Ball in a china shop!
Three Fields Entertainment is a small team of 11 people, some whom worked for Criterion on the Burnout series. Dangerous Golf is their first game and it clearly has inspiration from the Burnout titles in it’s presentation, it’s gameplay and it even has Burnout 3’s DJ Ted Stryker narrating the tutorial video with it’s latest update.
I didn’t play Dangerous Golf when it first launched, but immediately after the first update landed which included the aforementioned tutorial, along with fast restarts and a new control system. First of all, Dangerous Golf is an odd game as the name suggests…
The goal is simple…cause as much destruction as possible with your golf ball. The environments you do so are usually close-quarters with plenty of high-value items like champagne bottles, china plates, statues and plenty of other items that can be destroyed with your golf ball. After a specific number of items have been smashed, you can activate a Smashbreaker which lets you move the ball around for a certain time before having to tap B and then line up the shot for the course’s hole.
You don’t get a set of golf clubs though, but instead you launch the ball wherever the camera is facing. It’s also not a complete disaster if you miss the hole at the end, but it will impact your total damage score which is racked up in dollars, much like Burnout’s Crash Mode. Your scores will be pitted against friends who have played on a leaderboard for each event, for those who have the game and you can also play online or local multiplayer.
The game itself looks stunning. The attention to detail of each course, the physics system, the detail on the highly valuable items and then seeing it all wrecked is outstanding…even more so since such a small team made this. The patch will hopefully make people give it a second chance, but for me I never found there to be a problem with the game, so if you’ve let it pass you by then it’s hard for me not to recommend that you pick it up now.
The Verdict
Three Fields Entertainment have done an amazing job in basically combining crazy golf and Burnout’s Crash Mode into an insane experience, one that looks amazing and most importantly…incredibly fun to play.