Soccer Golf!

Soccer Golf!, exclamation mark and all, manages the feat of not being football golf, but at the same time literally being football golf. Let me explain. When I think football golf, I think of someone kicking a football along a smaller type of golf course where the ball goes into a hole. That's not what this game is. But there is a football and the goal is a hole with a flag.

This is exactly what you imagine a mobile game to be, but for console. It's drag (hold down the joystick in this case) and drop to send the ball flying a la Angry Birds. Very simple basics. Send the ball off from the starting point and try to get it to land in the small area where the flag is. The problem here is that if it was a mobile game, it would be something fun to play for 15 minutes in bed or on the toilet. On a console? 15 minutes and then it's not so entertaining anymore. Especially when the whole setup screams mobile game.

And the setup is that you have five balls/chances to make it all the way to the goal on 54 different courses divided into three different environments (jungle, snow, and cave). Along the way, there are all kinds of obstacles, such as laser beams, buttons to press, thorns, water, and of course bottomless holes. What makes the game a bit more exciting is that you can shoot the ball a second, third, fourth, and fifth time while the ball is still in the air. This also plays into the design of some courses where a second touch on the ball is a must to get past certain obstacles. But for the most part, the courses are relatively easy and only a few required me to try more than three or four times. Some, however, made me think a little harder about how to fire the next and the next shot. For an extra little challenge, you get up to three stars for how quickly you complete the course.

The look is charming, but nothing special. The levels are filled with just the right amount of stuff, not too much and not too little. Just right, as we like to say. It has a kind of cartoony style usually found in... well, mobile games. It's a problem I come back to time and time again. Had I found this on the App Store or Google Play for a couple of bucks, I wouldn't have thought about it at all. This is admittedly a cheap game, but I have a hard time seeing it finding an audience on consoles. Of what it's available for, it's a game best suited to Switch, hands down. The controls are also very basic. Use the joystick to choose which direction you fire the ball, the longer you hold it down the harder the shot will be. Then just hold down the shoot button and release it when you're ready to shoot. It's as simple as that.

Soccer Golf is a mediocre game at best. It's not bad, but it's not very good either. It's fun, for about 15 minutes before it gets way too monotonous. Again, if I had this on my mobile, I could play ten minutes here and there when I have nothing better to do. But it's nothing I'm going to boot up my console and play for a few minutes and move on to something else.