100ft Robot Golf (PS4)
With a premise as ridiculous as 100ft Robot Golf’s, you know going in that you’ll be having a fairly absurd experience. The seemingly paradoxical pairing of massive destructive machines with a sport that emphasizes quiet focus and the careful application of strength has to be played for laughs, and 100ft Robot Golf is keenly aware of its appeal. However, the game is not quite as absurd as one might expect.
Naturally, the main draw of 100ft Robot Golf is going to be the mechs you use to play. There is a good variety to their designs, some direct references to anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Voltron while others are original ideas like a giant hoverboarding mech with a pompadour and the bio-organic mech with a muscular look and its entire torso as its head. However, while the designs are appealing, your uses for them are surprisingly tame. Each one has a fairly decent degree of control over their swing, the player picking a destination for the shot and then needing to do character specific button presses to sync their planned shot with the executed one. Special abilities are meant to give an extra flair to this straightforward method of hitting your ball, some like being able to guide it in the air actually useful, but most feel like unnecessary fluff, mainly because there isn’t too much different from a regular golf game when you strip away the presentation.
The golf courses in 100ft Robot Golf do take place in cities, underwater, and even in space, but while the game wants you to go wild and destroy these places as you play with both your oversized club and your mech’s special weapons, there’s often not much reason to do so. The layouts of the courses have pretty obvious paths that won’t put your ball at risk of being intercepted by level geometry too often, and since the sync system makes it pretty easy to hit your shot right where you want it, even the possibility of accidentally sinking it somewhere near things to destroy isn’t too common. It can often feel like a waste of time to step aside and smash apart a building or indulge in the destruction the game seems like it wants you to embrace. Even when you might have to make a mess of the surrounding area, it’s less wanton chaos and more like pushing aside clutter, especially because objects break down into chunks that need to be swept aside after your initial attack. Luckily, course design picks up the slack, mainly by having a huge emphasis on uneven terrain. While you won’t need to smash much, there are courses where you are hitting your ball up the sides of mountains, down into the Marianas Trench, and across multiple islands. Your ball does have momentum to account for so it’s not dropping down exactly where your well-synced shot indicates, so there is some challenge in trying to make sure it doesn’t roll off into lava or end up stuck in a crater, and a few levels do at least have hard to avoid objects like a large bridge you will have to engage with a bit to get your ball exactly where you want it.
Decent course design helps salvage the underwhelming implementation of environmental destruction, and that relationship is especially relevant when it comes to the two play modes featured in 100ft Robot Golf. Most of the story mode missions focus not on the typical form of golf play, instead making crossing the course and sinking your ball in the hole a race with other giant robots. Precision is not as important as speed in this mode of course, although getting sloppy will make you lag behind. These are definitely not as challenging as regular golf because of the heavy focus on hard hits towards the hole, and the time crunch makes it so you can’t really justify stepping aside to smash apart buildings to build a new path, but there is still room for a little sabotage. Your attacks don’t really bother the other mechs, but your body is one big obstacle that the balls will bounce off of, the player even able to block their own ball’s path if the gravity is low and their mech is fast enough to run out in front of the shot. The course design having so many varying elevations means aiming is as important as power when it comes to getting to the hole in time, but there is thankfully a regular golf mode featured in many levels as well. Trying to sink your ball in as few strokes as possible across a few courses plays enough like the real sport to still be enjoyable if a little easy due to the swing mechanics. Both it and the race mode can be competitive in multiplayer or against motivated AI, but the unfocused giant mech angle and the controls means it’s neither as over the top as expected or particularly exceptional when viewed purely as a sport.
Thankfully, while the gameplay mostly just nails the visual absurdity of its premise rather than making that strangeness tangible in play, there’s more to 100ft Robot Golf’s ridiculous presentation than giant mechs and strange golfs locations. The story of the game revels in its humor and delights in mimicking the art style of 80s and 90s anime. The characters who actually pilot the mechs are a fun bunch of kooky individuals who are all drawn in a style that feels a perfect match for the Japanese animation its parodying, and to that end it makes fun of American dubbing practices to further the nostalgic feeling of the title. However, while having the lip sync deliberately not line up with the characters speaking is a fun touch, it’s a bit hard to tell where the line between deliberately bad and actually bad is drawn. For example, a character named Max is pivotal to arranging the 100ft Robot Golf tournament, but his line delivery sounds like someone trying not to laugh while doing a silly voice, his prominence in the story making it strange when he converses with characters who seem to have much better voice acting. With no outright ridiculous performances who are clearly meant to be awful, it makes the characters who do have the weirder voices feel a little anomalous.
The story and the character interactions do work surprisingly well despite a few odd ducks though. The story has you swapping between various golfers as Max tries to arrange a new 100ft Robot Golf tournament following the cancellation of the sport due to a Moon related disaster it was responsible for. The gradual introduction of each new character, their personal quirks, and how seriously this world takes such a silly sport all make for cutscenes that are fun to watch. Golf courses have funny names, pilots have funny backstories, and one of the playable mechs is literally five dogs piloting five dog mechs that combine into one giant dog mech, so there is definitely a lot of creativity put into the humorous angle of the game even if that doesn’t always come across in the gameplay. To make sure the laughs keep coming during the actual golf though, the game has recruited the talents of the three McElroy Brothers to play golf commentators. Delivering their lines with the same calm cadence of real life golf commentators but reacting to the ridiculousness of the game while adding their own quirky jokes to the mix all ensure that the story mode continues to carry the player along with a fun atmosphere and constant silliness. It’s not overbearing with the jokes either even though commentary will inevitably repeat over time, the plot enjoyable to follow because it isn’t in a rush to get to the next joke but still indulging in plenty of absurd ideas along the way. The fact the game’s main appeal is found in the writing and story scenes though does make the multiplayer mode’s enjoyability questionable, but the game is at least able to maintain its single player story long enough that the player will likely walk away pleased enough with the experience.
THE VERDICT: 100ft Robot Golf is, quite obviously, a wacky game, but more of the absurdity its core idea promises is found in the plot and visuals than the actual augmented sport. The golf’s added mechanics can feel a bit superfluous and underutilized while the actual hitting of the ball is surprisingly simple, and while the course design does keep things somewhat interesting, the greater focus on the race mode over traditional play does mean the gameplay isn’t quite where it needs to be to be appealing on its own. 100ft Robot Golf has to rely on its humor to make up for tepid golf play, but it manages to keeps itself engaging because its story and commentary properly expresses the hilariously silly promise of the premise.
And so, I give 100ft Robot Golf for PlayStation 4…
An OKAY rating. The idea of racing via golf is an idea with potential even though 100ft Robot Golf doesn’t explore it properly, but that’s because most of the attention seems to have gone towards the game’s story and visual design. This focus ultimately does give the game a lot of what makes it an interesting play, the cast including fun characters that inhabit a world that is fun to learn more about because of its connection with the absurdity of giant robots playing a precision sport. It’s not a laugh-a-minute ride but it does continue to provide amusing little jokes and situations for the plot and commentary to engage with, but your role is mostly just playing rather plain golf to connect these scenes together. The sport hasn’t been whittled down too far, but its low difficulty paired with a lack of any major transformation to match the world it’s inhabiting means it can’t really excite. Learning your giant mech’s ball ability is a burst of disco lights and music is more fun for its presentation than practicality, playing as an old giant mech dealer in his rust bucket of a ride is sillier in premise than execution, and learning the history of the disaster on the moon plays more into plot progression than the holes you’ll be playing to get there, but it doesn’t ever dip so low that you completely lose interest in either side of the game.
100ft Robot Golf’s name is a joke so, appropriately, the experience is based around providing a platform for even more of them. Greater substance, more meaningful mechanics, and a higher degree of challenge could have made the gameplay side of it more interesting to interact with, but the aesthetic, concepts, and commentary prevent it from growing dull. 100ft Robot Golf isn’t really about the sport it’s named for, it’s about embracing the deliberate absurdity of such an idea and exploring the wacky places it can be taken, it just doesn’t do so well enough to completely overshadow the basic play you partake in.