For some, the dogged pursuit of realism seen in some golf games leeches all the fun out of the exercise. For such individuals there are franchises like Everybody’s Golf for Sony’s platforms, then there are poor imitations and then there’s Let’s Golf for your iThingy.
Let’s Golf hit all the right buttons; cute, bright and colourful graphics, tight control and forgiving after-touch controls. Let’s Golf 2 takes things a bit further. For the same price, you’ll get a game where progression means levelling up the various characters, unlocking new ones and getting different items you can equip, further altering the stats of your golfers.
What stats? Power, Accuracy, Recovery and Putting. The only one that requires any explanation there is Recovery; this is how effective your attempts to add spin to the ball are once it’s in the air. You see, once you’ve sent the ball into the sky, a representation of the ball appears in the corner of the screen. Stroking this ball gives it a nudge in the direction you’ve stroked it.
The controls aren’t flashy. They don’t use any tilting or shaking, but the on-screen controls serve admirably. Indeed, it seems we’ve been using start-power-accuracy as long as there have been 3D golf games, whether each of those steps is the click of a mouse, the push of a button or the tap of a touch-screen. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The game also looks significantly better than its predecessor. To a fault in fact, since there is literally not one game more draining on your iDoodad’s battery. 30 minutes of play can consume 20% of battery life on an iPhone 3GS, for example. Like many iFramistan games though, your progress is still saved if you’re playing at the point you run out of power. And really, who would have a golfing session lasting longer than an hour? [Reviewers? - Ed]
Besides the differences in stats, each character has a specific skill, making the existence of characters more meaningful. These skills are things like No Wind for Chris, which allows you to effectively switch off the wind before you take a shot. Skills need to be charged though, so you can’t just use them for every shot you make.
The main meat of most golf games is in the career mode. That’s true here, but there are also challenges for plenty of extra game time. The challenge modes are Catch the Star, where you have to hit four very specific points on a course, Birdie or Bust, where you need to complete a hole at least one below par, Longest Putt, which gives you 15 seconds to make a tricky putt and Bunker Ball, like Longest Putt from a bunker.
As you’re playing through the game, there are trophies to be unlocked. As a Gameloft title, that means using their meta-gaming system (friends, trophies and leaderboards), which isn’t as well-made as networks like Plus+ or OpenFeint, but it does the job. It is annoying, however, that opening this sub-app forces a specific orientation on you. So if you prefer playing with the home button to your left, so the volume buttons are on top and the speaker less likely to be blocked, you’re going to have to turn the phone around any time you want to check the leaderboards and such. There are other issues with Gameloft’s system, but those aren’t issues with Let’s Golf 2.
When you take all the career mode content and add to it the challenges and a multiplayer mode, what you end up with is more to do than you can shake an iStick at. Sorry, club.
