Humans are obsessed with aesthetically pleasing things.
We spend a fortune, both in time and money, to ensure that we look good, our homes look good, our cars look good, our websites look good. For if something doesn’t look good, it can’t possibly be good.
In reality, it matters little. Yes, there’s no harm in ensuring that something, someone, is visually appealing, but it’s all a bit pointless if that thing fails to excel.
Case in point, Pure Mini Golf.
See, the minimalist styling and artistic avenues put into Pure Mini Golf can be nothing but highly appealing. In fact, this is a very good looking game that utilises pastel colours well, injecting plenty of design ideas into what would otherwise be a drab mini golf game. But in the process of making it very good looking, the developers at Gametry have seemingly forgotten to spend time, any time, on the more important aspects of a game – how it plays, and how much fun it is able to deliver to the player.
In Pure Mini Golf, your goal is to take a little golf ball and ping it around a whole ton of crazy courses, with hope of sinking it in the enticing hole prior to your shot count reaching zero. Usual mini golf stuff, eh?
Well yes, it is, and Pure Mini Golf rarely moves from what you would expect of a game of such ilk, dropping in twisting holes, gaps to traverse, platforms to make the most of and more. Fall to any of the multitude of obstacles that get in your way, and you’ll find yourself thrust back to the start of the hole again, any shots that you have previously taken, lost forevermore. That means, at times, your only real option is to head into the menus and ‘restart’, for some of the holes are so lengthy and require so many shots, that even a single lost one will see you destined for failure.
Set in an isometric viewpoint, the triggers on your controller allow you to scan through various viewpoints, with an overhead option and slight zoom aiding navigation. But it’s that iso-view that is also the downfall of Pure Mini Golf, with it being extremely tricky to work out exactly where your ball is going to go, and where it will end. It’s not helped that the ball in itself doesn’t roll particularly smoothly, occasionally stuttering and starting as it moves along. And the physics aren’t the best either, with power-ball vibes sometimes coming to the fore. A golf ball this does not feel like.
Further frustrations come about thanks to the shot aim blending in too much with the colour palettes used for each hole. A white line, coming up against a very light pale green, nearly always annoys, and even though setting the power sees that line pop more, we can’t help but feel that a simple colour change to something darker, blacker, would have been much more preferable. It’s not as if it’s easy to work out how much power to place into each shot either, with randomness seeing one shot after another end in a different way.
Some 50 or so stages make up the Campaign of Pure Mini Golf, with the aim of unlocking stage after stage until you leave exhausted by what Pure Mini Golf offers. However much of that campaign is a super easy playthrough, and it wasn’t really until past level 35 in which we started to discover too much in terms of difficulty. At that point though, the climb is steep, too steep, as the game starts to become more unfair than anything else. And we’re not sure about you, but ‘unfair’ games don’t float our boat. We don’t think we’re in the minority either, as it’s around that stage where the gained achievement percentage from the community falls off a cliff. Very much like our ball. Over and over again.
Aside from that comes the Challenge mode, as you try and work through as many stages as possible, creating a lengthy run of holes prior to a single failure. Apart from setting a PB and then maybe trying to beat it once or twice, it’s a mode that comes up short. Not as short as Arcade mind, as it chucks random holes the way of the player, unlimited shots ensuring it plays more like a practice mode than anything else.
There’s also some local multiplayer present in Pure Mini Golf. Capable of handling up to four players, depending on controller numbers, it’s a decent enough way of wasting five minutes or so in a gaming session. We’re not sure many will go back to it after that though.
It’s a shame then that the visual side of things has obviously been such a dominant factor in the creation of Pure Mini Golf. We can’t help but love the way it looks, and have to praise Gametra for designing a golf game that plays on the minimal. But it does so at the detriment of the gameplay and the fun is soon removed and frustrations soon pop up.
A low asking price helps, and you may feel it’s worth a play for some easy achievements and Gamerscore, but Pure Mini Golf is far from a competitor in the world of virtual crazy golf. Mostly it’s a reminder that aesthetics alone cannot compensate for flawed gameplay.
Pure Mini Golf: An Xbox Hole-in-One? – https://www.thexboxhub.com/pure-mini-golf-an-xbox-hole-in-one/
Buy Pure Mini Golf on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/pure-mini-golf/9p72534xmvcb
