King of Clubs
Score: 30% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Crave Developer: Oxygen Games Media: CD/1 Players: 1 - 4 Genre: Sports/ Sports (Golf)/ Party
Graphics & Sound: The premise of a videogame version of mini-golf sounds good until you realize that all golf essentially becomes mini-golf when converted to videogame format. Easy to pick up and play, simple mechanics, sometimes-zany characters and courses? Sounds familiar, I know. So what then does King of Clubs add to the videogame golf canon? Not much is the unfortunate but honest answer. The leading edge of King of Clubs is promising. A bunch of guys trapped with some weirdo in a mini-golf... paradise, or hell... out in the middle of nowhere. Forced to dress up in crazy costumes and play golf for the fiendish amusement of their captor. At least that was all the sense I could make of the opening movie. The actual game that begins immediately after the movie is far less interesting than the teaser/trailer would have you believe. The guys are stuck playing mini-golf in weird costumes and the locations are crazy, but everything is like shooting balls in a box. I can imagine more variety in golf would come from those weird machines you used to see at arcades where there was a net and a television screen showing video of a golf course. At least a stab at realism and something that feels outdoors-y. The King of Clubs formula attempts to make each course rather silly and broken looking. Scenes from other courses show through cracks in the wall, there appears to be duct tape on the moving parts in several exhibits, and the "special effects" are very unspecial. The concept of a really fake mini-golf park probably looked really cool on the drawing table, done up in a storyboard with those cool colored pencils or pastel markers... The conversion to Wii left this patient DOA as the designers did maybe too well in depicting a dilapidated wreck of a park. The whole point of golf is to get outdoors, and the whole point of mini-golf is to be surprised and delighted. These courses are a surprise in terms of how poorly they play and there's no delight in putting through a simulated shabby wreck of a golf course. The character design is at least amusing, worth a chuckle, especially in combination with the voice-acting talent. The characters chosen for the game aren't like to offend everybody, but they aren't very creative. The costume bit was cute until we realized that there isn't really a dress-up feature in the game that would make it fun to customize your character. Instead you get to customize your balls. [puts on best Beavis and Butthead voice] "Baaaalls...heh-heh." The often neglected ball trail customization is included here, because the zany physics behind the game dictate that you must see the line your ball will travel before, during, and after you hit it. Otherwise, how would you know where the ball is going? The only thing in the sound-and-vision department that King of Clubs got marginally right is the music. Turkey-fried southern rock, sock-hop bop, and other truck stop tunes grace the game, serving no particular purpose against the theme of each course (shag-dancing meets the Jurassic period, anyone?), but doing a nice job just being good game music. You'll want to complete each course quickly so the music doesn't go on repeat, but then again you'll want to get this whole experience over with quickly so you can pop another disk in the Wii and begin to repair your damaged gaming karma...
Gameplay: The point of King of Clubs is to play through a series of courses, solo or with friends. The Tournament Mode is where you'll most likely start, single-player style. This pits you against a CPU opponent, but we all know the real opponent is the number of strokes you'll need to reach that little hole. The sequence of play is identical to regular golf, with the player furthest from the pin hitting until the two players can go in sequence. The first smack on a course is based on the winner of the previous hole, again a standard convention. You have a choice of clubs and balls as you approach the hole, and can see different angles on the action with the adjustable camera. Being a mini-golf game, King of Clubs includes little pick-ups along the way that help you cash in for some extras back at the Pro Shop. Once you open a course in Tournament, you can use Practice Mode to fine tune your game. The final mode in single-player is Speed Golf, where you don't have time to sit back and ponder your approach to the hole as in the other modes. The multiplayer supports up to four players, which is nice, but no online play, which bites. What's up with a sports game on a fully networked console that doesn't include online play? The options include several competitive modes such as Party, Golf Warriors, and Speed Golf. The deeper modes are Versus and Grand Prix, which offer a chance to program a series of holes or just play any unlocked course with several friends. The Pro Shop option is pure fluff. You can purchase baubles and special balls, including the option to see your ball leave a trail or trace as it rolls. Special equipment would be fine if the difference was significant between set-ups. The problem comes from physics so off-kilter and hard to predict that even the standard equipment feels like it has a natural handicap. When you're not buying items in the shop, you can grab a few on each course; why you'd lose the hole to pick up special items is beyond us, but it probably made sense at some point in the planning phase. Special items like the "Swerve Club" or the "Rubber Ball" will do exactly what you expect, changing the behavior of your ball after you smack it. Choosing clubs and balls is fairly intuitive, but completely unnecessary to winning. Everything about King of Clubs is window dressing for a fairly well busted golf game. The pickups, Pro Shop items, and special characters are the icing on the fluffy cake, almost like they were intended to take your mind off of the calamity unfolding before you.
Difficulty: The creators of King of Clubs were kind enough to design most of the collectibles and special items around helping you make the game more playable. Do-overs (known in golf as "mulligans") and the "Free Ball" help you sink that fabled hole-in-none and keep your handicap low. If you get the sense that the handicap for King of Clubs is fairly well built in, you are on the right track. The controls are weak, the courses are either impossible or ridiculously simple, and the physics are laughable. At the end of the day, you either start the entire development process over again or throw in lots of stuff to help make the game more playable. It's debatable whether King of Clubs achieved playability once you've hacked around a few of the early courses, but then mini-golf is actually kind of tough to play. Maybe King of Clubs is actually a brilliantly accurate mini-golf simulator? The courses are full of tricky obstacles that are virtually impassable and the controls prohibit you from timing your approach to the hole. I've rarely seen anyone do anything on a mini-golf course other than hack at the ball and laugh, so perhaps King of Clubs has hit it on the mark...
Game Mechanics: We recently picked up a copy of the old Neo-Geo golf game, as part of a collection for Wii. The marvel of this 90s relic is that it still plays well and comes across as a decent golf game. It's like playing what we now know as "the mini-map" without all the beautiful 3D landscapes! The controls for this game were close to the controls that have become almost standard across the videogame golf world (if only that were a world I could inhabit!) where three presses of the button control the hit, the power, and the accuracy. The style of control for King of Clubs goes in a different direction even than previous Wii games where a button-press set the power and the swing set power and accuracy. This control style has you press a button to begin the swing, pull back the club to set power, press a button to set the power, and then swipe the Wii-mote to initiate the swing. If this sounds like too many swings and presses, you are correct. The control scheme is good in theory, but it doesn't work well in practice. Pulling back the Wii-mote is highly inaccurate, and the increment of the swing is too broad. Trial-and-error becomes your technique and there is absolutely no fluidity or simulation of an actual golf swing. Trying to reinvent the wheel is never a good idea, but at least make sure you come out with a wheel instead of a triangle... The worst part of all this is that it seems hard to mess up golf, and harder still to mess up mini-golf. King of Clubs manages to smear the whole genre, on a console that is uniquely gifted when it comes to sports-game translations. The problems are numerous, but the worst is the complete apathy you'll have toward a game that falls among some very respectable competition in titles like We Love Golf! and Super Swing Golf. Considering all the cons, steer clear of this turkey.
-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications AKA Matt Paddock
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