When I started this review, I had heard a lot about Dangerous Golf. Most of it was quite positive because the game was coming from the original creators of the Burnout franchise. However, recently there has been a rather significant controversy over the state of the game on PlayStation 4, Steam and Xbox One. I went into this review thinking that all of these claims were exaggerated and customers were ranting about it on social media for no reason. Now that I’ve played it, I realize that the claims, while slightly exaggerated, have validity, but Dangerous Golf suffers from numerous other issues. The number of pixels displayed on screen is the least of its concerns.
Dangerous Golf takes place in different countries if you play the campaign. You have to destroy objects with your golf ball in different arenas and you win medals depending on how much destruction you achieve. The premise is quite simple but what stands out most are the physics. There is so much destruction and every object can break apart in multiple ways. This is definitely groundbreaking in this sense.
It offers other twists on standard golf gameplay as well. For example, after making a successful shot, you can light the ball on fire and control it through the air to some degree and destroy a multitude of objects to increase your score. This only lasts for a limited amount of time so be sure to try and hit everything. There are also special items which give you many more points than the normal cans and pans littered around levels. There’s quite a lot of depth to the gameplay. As you progress, you can unlock cards which offer you other perks and gameplay variety. You’ll never get bored playing Dangerous Golf that’s for sure.
While the title might be quite short, it does offer a lot of replayability if you want to play the multiplayer modes. You can also go back to beat the high scores of your friends. The criticism that this game doesn’t offer value for your money is quite unfounded but these aren’t the title’s real problems. The mechanics and performance are where it really lets you down. Before we go into that though, let me add that Dangerous Golf is quite challenging. You have to earn a multitude of metals to unlock additional stages. Be sure to go back and play them again to get that gold because you might hit an impasse later on if you aren’t careful. This happened to me numerous times when I tried to rush through the game. Now that we got all the praise out of the way, it’s time to talk about the not-so-nice parts.
When you imagine a golf game, one standard feature all of them have is the ability to see your trajectory or at the very least where you’re hitting the ball. There isn’t any guesswork involved when it comes to shooting the ball. Dangerous Golf is the exact opposite. There are no guides, or clubs, or markers which show you where you’re hitting it or how hard you’re hitting it. You just align a shot and flick the thumbstick. If you press the B button then, I think, the ball is hit in the air. During my playthrough I was honestly always confused about the controls. This is the first time in any game—and I’ve played titles like The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4—that I felt that I had no precision over my actions. I don’t know if this is a design choice or just an omission by the developers but either ways it’s bizarre. Maybe giving inexperienced players the option to turn guide lines on would’ve helped the title during the initial stages.
The frame rate of the game is also wonky. Now, you might wonder why I used the term wonky. Well, I use it because I’m not sure what’s going on here. I don’t know if the frame rate fluctuates or the game has frame pacing issues. Either ways, it’s not stable at thirty frames per second. I would expect a game from a developer who has a rich pedigree of making physics-heavy titles to perfect the performance but I guess you can’t have it all. Considering that it runs at 800p on Xbox One and you can measure the jaggies with a plastic ruler, this is shocking to say the least. Why the Xbox One version is so unoptimized is incomprehensible. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely playable but it just doesn’t offer a smooth experience which can be quite jarring for many gamers. Having suffered through Lichdom: Battlemage recently, I don’t think I can handle performance issues anymore. I’ve experienced my fair share of them for a lifetime.
Lastly, I have to address the loading screens. There are loading screens everywhere. Each time you load the game you have to wait. Each time you enter a level you have to wait. Each time you restart a level you have to wait. Each time you exit a level you have to wait. Even continuing the game from one level to the next requires you to suffer through that annoying loading animation. Surely the game could’ve been more optimized. I realize that the title is physics-heavy but there’s also the user experience factor you have to take into account when developing a game. Surely there has to be a better way to handle this. Waiting around in this game gave me flashbacks to Just Cause 3 on Xbox One which was even worse.
Summary
Overall, Dangerous Golf is a fun and addictive game if you can tolerate the blurry graphics and low-resolution presentation. To be honest I didn’t have an issue with them but I know gamers who might. Many other staff members who I showed the title to immediately noticed it. The fact that such a fun game is marred by technical woes is disheartening as I was expecting a lot from the creators of Burnout. I realize that Three Fields Entertainment is a new studio but standards of polish have to be universal. You can’t release a game with these issues like this. Just because other titles are broken is no excuse to charge consumers for a subpar experience with promises of future improvements. This trend in the gaming industry has to end. Had the performance issues and jarring graphical problems not been there, I would’ve easily given the game a seven. However, in it’s current state it’s much lower. In good conscience I just can’t recommend the Xbox One version at this moment. I’m not sure if these problems will ever be fixed to be honest and that’s what frightens me the most.
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.