Of all the many golf properties out there, Everybody’s Golf has reliably been the best of them. It’s also a series that has gone through a fair few developers, starting with Camelot (which would go on to develop the Mario Golf series), then Japan Studio and Clap Hanz for many years. It has also been a Sony-published property throughout all of this. Now it’s got a new publisher (Bandai Namco), and a new developer (HYDE). While Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots needs some work, the series does seem to have found a good new home.
HYDE is a bit of a maverick developer, having worked on everything from Jack Jeanne to Tamagotchi Plaza, Hyakki Castle to Disney Tsum Tsum Festival. Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots is its first golf game, however. Right from the outset, it’ll be comfortably familiar to anyone who has played any of the games in the series. HYDE has implemented that same, familiar bunch of anime-cute characters and environments, and the same three-button press mechanic that has been part of Hot Shots since the early days. Press once to start the swing power up, press once more to set the power, and then press once more to set accuracy. It’s such a simple system, and yet it’s so elegant, and I vastly prefer this to every effort that developers have made to have a “stick flick” or similar control system.
With that being said, HYDE hasn’t quite nailed the precision of this system that we’ve seen in some other Everybody’s Golf titles in years past, and indeed in Clap Hanz’s own Easy Come Easy Golf, also on Nintendo Switch. It feels like there’s a slight delay over pressing a button and the action being registered. The lag is only tiny, but it’s just enough that it can stymie “perfect” shots, and Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots can be brutal on inaccuracy.
If your shot ends up in the “grey” zone that rests outside of the small “perfect” shot zone, the ball will travel down the fairway and towards the green, but in some drastically different angle than intended. Nine times out of ten, it’s going to end up in the rough or bunkers, and that percentage is even higher if you’re trying to put spin on the ball. If the shot lands outside of the grey zone, the ball goes absolutely nowhere. It counts as an entirely missed shot. The only way to be sure that the ball will go the way you intended is to hit a perfect shot. Given how small those windows can be with some clubs and in some situations, this feels particularly punitive and certainly makes the early going harder than it needs to be.
As you unlock better characters and level them up, the going does get a little easier, which is very counter-intuitive. To this day, the best golf game that I’ve played is Mario Golf on the N64, where lower-level characters have better accuracy and control, but the courses were designed to benefit a longer drive in the hand of a skilled player who can handle the lower accuracy. Here. The lower-level characters not only struggle to make the green in regulation, but they are typically harder to control than the better characters. The only thing that makes the early game manageable is how forgiving the first two or three courses can be.
Those characters are at least charming, with some fun, colourful designs and quips. They use those quips a little too often, but the animation and designs never grow old. Each character has their own story to work through, which means several chapters where a character has a couple of lines of conversation with one or two others before you play a few holes or a round of golf against them. These narratives are hardly Shakespeare, but the preppy energy will elicit a smile or two along the way, and you’ll certainly have your favourites by the time you work through them.
That will take quite some time, and there are plenty of other gameplay modes too. Beyond the story mode, there’s a Challenge mode, where you’ll unlock more characters as you complete a wide range of different challenges across increasingly difficult “tiers.” There’s traditional stroke play, online play, a chaotic party “wacky golf” option, and some additional minor modes. Progress in terms of unlocking new players and then levelling them up is fairly slow, to the point of feeling like a grind sometimes, but the moment-to-moment play is so much fun that it’s not a chore either.
With dozens of characters drawn from the series and a full ten courses, Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots does act like a celebration of the series to date. However, it’s also painfully clear that this game comes from a new developer trying to find their place with such a venerable series. HYDE was timid to try to be too innovative, but at the same tim,e clearly struggled to achieve the same precision from the previous developers. Unlike Clap Hanz’s Easy Come Easy Golf, HYDE’s game actually wants to challenge players and require skill. And I’m quite sure that a patch or two will get the game to where it needs to be. For now, however, as enjoyable as Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots is, it’s just a touch too frustrating for its own good.
