GL Golf Lite
by Eric March on October 13, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Rate it:
(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
App Name: GL Golf Lite
Developer: Nuclear Nova Software
Category: Games: Sports
This one has been sitting on my plate for a bit now, but it kept getting pushed back by other things, so I’m going to polish this one off.
I like computer golf games. I don’t much care for the real sport, but as a computer game it’s a nice relaxing game of strategy and a bit of hand-eye coordination that shares some properties with artillery games, which I also like. (Gauging shot strength, angle, wind speed, etc.) So I was glad to see that such a golf game had been released for the iPhone and Touch. There wasn’t a demo available on the App Store until about a week ago or so, so once it was available I got a chance to try it out.
The screenshots looked passable, though pretty threadbare — but still, I thought, it should be halfway decent. Unfortunately, the reality turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. It uses OpenGL-ES for full 3D gameplay, but it cuts all kinds of corners in its seeming attempt to boil computer golf games down to only the most essential of elements required to let the user know that they are, in fact, playing golf. Small, repetative textures litter the fairground, while manicured lawn textures cover the green and a basic rough area looks like it was created with a green-shaded noise filter. There’s dreadfully simple water texture, bits of flat X/Y positioned trees and the occasional shrub, basic light brown sand traps, plus a sky background that looks came straight out of Photoshop’s Render->Clouds filter. There isn’t even a 3D player holding the club. It just floats etherially in mid-air. The whole thing made me feel like I was playing Jack Nicklaus Golf version 1.0.
The game mechanics were also a let-down. The slider controls on the left that let you set the ball’s English (backspin, draw/fade, loft/punch) are far too narrow to make sliding them with any useful level of granularity possible. Maybe if your finger terminates in a point you might have better luck, but most of us have digits that are relatively sausage-like, so if we want just a little bit more backspin or a little less loft, we have to stab at the slider and hope we can just nudge it. Unfortunately, you usually end up moving it much farther than you want, which means you have to keep fiddling with it until you get it about where you want it.
The rest of the menu visuals are quite plain, though the AdMob banner in the lite version looks like a cut & paste job. (That’s AdMob’s fault though, not theirs.) There are some nice configuration options, such as the ability to set difficulty mode, time of day, season, and ball colour, just to change things up a bit, but they don’t really help mitigate the game’s issues much.
The game itself plays fine, once you’ve finished wrestling with the controls and put on your rose-coloured glasses. Basic physics work fine, so once you’re actually playing, it’s a respectable game of golf. Unfortunately, the fiddly UI and ugly visuals make this one a big ol’ pass from me.
Related Posts:
Posted in Games: Sports
