Pocket Mini Golf (Switch)
Standardization is the norm in many real life sports, but miniature golf is one of the rare cases where creativity and design diversity are actively embraced. While you’re still trying to get your ball to the hole in as few strokes as possible as in regular golf, mini golf puts strange and whimsical obstacles in your path. While slipping your ball between a windmill’s blade is certainly a memorable challenge, many of the holes on a mini golf course actually have much smaller challenges like little barriers and slopes. Pocket Mini Golf does have the freedom to get more wild than real mini golf courses since it’s a video game, but rather than going all out, it actually seems a little closer to the kind of mini golf courses you might see in real life, but with a dash of unusual concepts on top so it’s not too plain.
Pocket Mini Golf began its life on mobile phones, and its Switch port maintains the uncomplicated nature of a golf game you’re meant to play for a few minutes at a time. 50 courses are included in the base game, and when you play them in order, you can see a steady rise in the kinds of concepts featured. When things begin you face a lot more small stretches of land that bend, twist, or have barriers scattered about, the idea being you need to find the right ricochets off the course borders to get the ball in the hole. As things begin to advance though, you’ll find areas where you’ll send your ball through a loop-de-loop, push up hills, and unsurprisingly slip through a windmill’s blades to get to the hole. The small size of the courses means they are quick to complete if you hit the ball right with many having a guaranteed hole in one setup to discover, but once you get past the very plain openers you do start to see some with clearer and more interesting level concepts.
For example, boosters start to become a feature that will speed up your ball if it rolls across them. In one level, you can try to take a booster to slip through a small opening to get right to the hole, or you can take the longer way around which is less likely to whiff since you need spot-on aim to get through that opening. Sometimes you’ll be able to find your own shortcut like dropping your ball off an elevated piece of ground to skip over a wall, and in other levels it can be about finding the right amount of power so you don’t go flying off the courses that are inexplicably floating high up in the sky. There aren’t really any concepts that will wow prospective players unless you purchase the Fairway DLC, the extra batch of 40 holes including ideas like elevator platforms, rotating level pieces, and even more cases where the right power and aim are key to slipping through precise openings to the hole.
Pocket Mini Golf is itself fairly cheap so justifying the Fairway DLC to spice up the experience a bit isn’t too hard, but whether it’s worth it or not will come down to which modes on offer you favor. The game allows you to play through the holes in order or in a randomly shuffled manner, the goal just being to complete it for the sake of seeing the content on offer. This alone would be a bit basic and easy to complete in one sitting, especially since it’s more focused on getting through the courses rather than aiming to do so in as few strokes as possible. Casual Mode is just that, a casual way to play through the levels with no worries of par. There are little gems placed in the level to try and grab though for an extra little goal, and these are actually important to Challenge Mode. In Challenge Mode you are given three balls per hole, and any time you don’t sink one in the hole after hitting it, you lose one. You will be where your ball was so you can tackle more challenging holes without having your progress reset every time, but if you run out of balls for that hole, you need to pay gems to continue.
The gems are definitely a relic of the mobile game business model where you could pay real money to continue, but Pocket Mini Golf keeps things manageable by placing a few unique holes that are purely about grabbing a bunch of gems on an easy path to the hole. Another interesting aspect of Pocket Mini Golf’s hole design is how usually the hole itself is surrounded by a large bowl so the ball will roll in so long as you get in the vicinity of it. This is especially helpful in courses where you have to pull off a jump or ricochet to even get to the hole, lessening the skill requirement and allowing for longer runs of Challenge Mode without having to dip into a gem pool that is actually not too hard to build up.
Hitting the ball in Pocket Mini Golf is very straightforward, it almost feeling more like pool than golf. You pull back the control stick to add power to your hit, but you can pull it to the sides to give a very sharp spin to it. A bit of the distance it will travel is shown by a dotted line that will let you pull off the curve shots exactly as they are shown despite them seeming to defy physics. Luckily when your ball is rolling things are fairly grounded in reality so you can predict how it will interact with the environment. Some stages are a bit larger or have obstacles that can be hard to understand if you don’t rotate the camera or switch to an aerial view, but luckily those options are a button press away. Pocket Mini Golf can actually be a fairly relaxing game to play because of its simple controls and small goals, but the music certainly helps, a fair bit of it simple yet beautiful and some having a bit more pep to it that can help invigorate what might be the game’s best mode: Multiplayer.
There isn’t anything particularly unique to Multiplayer truly. It’s technically just a race between 2 to 4 players, the person who finishes their batch of holes first winning. The rules can be tinkered with some, adding in things like random course order, removing larger golf courses, and even throwing in the three shots per hole limitation from Challenge Mode. If a player does run out of their shots with that setting on their run ends there and it’s just a matter of seeing how well others do, but the actual race aspect can make the courses far more engaging than going them alone. You don’t have the time to set up your shots as much, mistakes are felt more, and the bigger courses really start to feel difficult when you’re trying to outpace the competition. Taking that shortcut ramp is a lot riskier when it can mean the difference between getting ahead or falling far behind, and some levels that might otherwise be annoying on your own become vital pace breakers when someone is on a tear as they must slow down if they want to get the right power and shot angle to avoid losing time. It’s not going to be a heart-pounding race to finish all the courses or anything, but since every player is golfing at once, it can be satisfying to look over and see them struggling as you start to pull ahead after some solid shots.
THE VERDICT: Pocket Mini Golf has a clean and relaxing presentation that makes for an easy little timewaster, the simple controls working well with hole concepts that don’t really aim to break the mold. They aren’t all plain thankfully and the challenge feels more about getting the ball into the hole in one stroke rather than overcoming difficult courses, but Challenge Mode adds in a decent difficult twist to the play despite its gem system perhaps needing some adjustment. A quick multiplayer race to complete the holes definitely feels like Pocket Mini Golf’s best feature, the holes being easy enough to complete but with the right amount of variables or slightly tougher courses to lead to a rise and fall in player fortunes. There isn’t anything exceptional on offer, but while the Switch might be hard to fit in a pocket, Pocket Mini Golf works as the kind of game you play for a bit when you’re hankering for a slightly quirky but not over the top mini golf game.
And so, I give Pocket Mini Golf for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY verdict. I can see many people giving this game a far lower rating simply because it’s not doing anything outside of the box or really embracing any wacky ideas. I can see a few people being bothered by the gem system as well if they don’t realize they’re surprisingly easy to earn. However, Pocket Mini Golf is very much a game doing something very small decently, and its supposed flaws come from what players might expect rather than the substance of the experience. The multiplayer certainly seems like the area the game has the most potential, a lot of its mechanics finding purchase when they’re part of a multiplayer race. It doesn’t matter that some of the courses are plain if they’re going to be part of a marathon where having the easy ones pop up can shift around how the race progresses. Hitting the ball is easy to understand but has a few little twists to it like actual twists to your shot so that an experienced player does have a few tools to pull from but a novice won’t be left in the dust if they go for straight shots. The gimmicks on offer are humble but do vary things up enough, although the Fairway DLC probably should have just been thrown into the base game so that it could wow with a few more of the strange concepts featured there. Things never get absurd though and I’d love for the game to embrace the possibilities of a virtual space more, but it doesn’t hurt to have a simple mini golf experience that at least looks a little more like something you’d see in real life despite the courses all floating in the clouds.
Pocket Mini Golf: Hole In One combines the game with its DLC for 3 dollars total, and both that version, the game separately, and the DLC seem to go on sale fairly often. A low price doesn’t make a mediocre game better, but I do believe if you have some friends who are into golf it’s certainly a price worth paying for the bit of fun it can provide. There are a lot of areas for improvement to make it easier to recommend, but Pocket Mini Golf’s purpose is given away in its name. It’s not trying to be a robust or imaginative miniature golf experience, it’s just a way to play mini golf on a device you can take anywhere. If that idea appeals to you you’ll probably get what you want from such a humble game, but you’ll probably know if you won’t enjoy it just by looking at its straightforward premise.