Golf Club Wasteland

Golf Club Wasteland was reviewed on a PS4

If there’s one thing that I never expected, it was to fall in love with a 2D golf game. Not because of the sport itself, but because of the emotionally engaging story that it tells. Yup, you’ve heard that right; Golf Club Wasteland has an amazing narrative, a story that’ll stick with you long after you’ve beaten the game’s 35 challenging stages.

It’s so much more than just playing golf. It’s a story about hope, despair and new beginnings.

What is Golf Club Wasteland?

Golf Club Wasteland is a 2D golf game in which your objective is to play golf in a post-apocalyptic desolate planet earth. After an event called the great catastrophe, humans have evacuated the planet, instead taking residence on Mars. Other than listening to a radio station, there’s not much to do on the red planet. That’s why the 1% on Mars have decided to turn the abandoned planet Earth into a giant golf course. It’s a scenario that doesn’t seem too far-fetched to be honest.

The story feels like a tribute to a black mirror episode as it does a great job of building this dystopian version of Earth and Mars. While the whole game is set on Earth, the radio interviews from the citizens of tesla city, the city that humans built on Mars, succeed at painting a vivid image of what life is like up there. This image is also greatly enhanced thanks to the great voice acting from both the radio host and his interviewees.

Most of the game’s plotline stems from the playable character. What starts out as an unnamed protagonist quickly becomes a complex and well-written character thanks to the tidbits of information provided by his in-game diary and by the radio transmissions. Half of the fun is uncovering his past, so I’ll leave that up to you to discover by yourselves. Just know that there is a bittersweet ending that ties up the game wonderfully in the end and it does in fact, leave quite an impact.

Let’s talk gameplay

Golf Club Wasteland is a simple game. The controls are basic. Aim your golf club, and hit that ball. While the first few stages start out simple and only require a few shots to reach the hole, the later stages are larger and more expanded. There’s two difficulty options available. A story mode that doesn’t limit the number of puts you make and a challenge mode that fixes a certain amount of puts.

That’s where my only complaint about the game comes from. Retrying a stage takes way too much time. Pausing the menu screen and waiting for the stage to reload isn’t particularly long, but during certain stages, I had to retry countless of times so the loading screens do add up. What makes this worse is that certain animations are unskippable.

Watching the protagonist climb up the same stairs 30 times or so can get extremely tedious and frustrating. I hope that the developers would fix this issue in a future patch by adding a quick retry button and the ability to skip the animations.

The animations though, add a lot of character to the game. Whenever you miss a hole by an inch or two, your playable character will grunt, groan, or make some sort of a reaction. He also follows the ball around using a jetpack if it’s too far away or simply walks towards it if it’s nearby. These tiny animations also work at fleshing out the character. You can sense his anguish by the way he slowly shuffles his feet, his movements are heavy and sluggish, like an old man who’s tired of living.

Cleverly Designed Stages

There are quite a few cleverly designed stages. Such as a marble hand held up in the air by a crane where you have to shoot the ball step by step along the crane and then dropping it on the hand. What makes these stages even better is how your character reacts to them, for example, when he lands on the hand, he balances his feet as the hand starts swinging back and forth. Another one of the game’s memorable stages will have you crossing the balconies of a multi-storied apartment complex where you have to traverse the gaps between several rooftops until reaching your final destination.

The sense of desolation stems from quite a few other stages such as an abandoned airport filled with discarded travel bags or an abandoned supermarket where the neon lights flicker each time your golf ball hits them. What makes these locations even better is the game’s usage of the color blue which is mesmerizing and it sets the scene for a world that’s long gone.

Make Sure Your Headphones Are On!

Playing Golf Club Wasteland with a good pair of headphones is a must. It’s the definition of a blissful experience. Listening to the catchy indie music really does a great job of absorbing you and immersing you in the game, especially when combined with the radio transmissions that offer at times a bit of background about each song. For example, a girl tells of her memories on Earth and how she spent the night dancing at a nightclub listening to a song that blasted the word “repetition” over and over again, only for you to hear that same song a few minutes later. There’s also a few attempts at injecting a bit of humor, like a few mentions of Covfefe, but the game largely has a depressing but endearing tone.

Overall,

Golf Club Wasteland is definitely worth playing. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s challenging, fun, creative and tells a compelling story. Radio Nostalgia from Mars, alongside the atmospheric stages, paints a vivid image of the game’s world. Everything about Golf Club Wasteland is perfectly designed, from its simple but solid gameplay to its memorable songs and even its voice acting. It would be perfect if it weren’t for the lack of a quick retry button.

What started out as a simple 2D golf game quickly exceeded my expectations and became one of the best games that I’ve played in a while.

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Special thanks go to Wire Tap Media for providing us with a review code.

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You should play Golf Club Wasteland if you

• Are interested in a challenging 2D game
• Enjoy a compelling story
• Would love the catchy music
• Enjoy golf games
• Don’t mind the unskippable animations
• Love the black mirror-esque vibes

Golf Club Wasteland Score

9/10