Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots Review: Semi-Rough Around the Edges

After lying dormant for the better part of a decade, Everybody’s Golf (or, Hot Shots Golf for those in North America) is being dusted off and thrust back into the spotlight. But for those who grew up on Sony’s cartoony take on golf, this new entry might look a little unfamiliar. With development handled by Hyde this time around, the curiously-named Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots certainly bears more than a passing resemblance to past titles, it doesn’t exactly pick up where longtime torchbearer Clap Hanz left off.

After booting up Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots for the first time, it only takes a few minutes to realize that something seems… off. Sure, the playable roster features a few familiar faces, and I was quickly greeted by the familiar tortoise and hare icons after mis-timing a few strokes in the game’s training mode, but Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots is decidedly less charming and vibrant compared to its PlayStation 4 predecessor. Courses and environments look less punchy and colorful, characters and camera transitions lack the flair and fluidity I’ve come to expect, and, somehow, the visual fidelity (particularly when it comes to textures) is more akin to a last-gen title.

To be clear, I didn’t come into Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots expecting ray-traced lighting and a razor-sharp 4K image, but as someone who occasionally boots up 2017’s Everybody’s Golf for a few rounds of carefree fun, Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots can look a bit lackluster in comparison. It’s something I’m perfectly willing to contend with (especially considering Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots is a cross-platform title with a budget-friendly price), but it’s also not something that can be entirely excused.

Thankfully, when it comes to the moment-to-moment gameplay, Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots delivers in spades clubs. There are a few different options to choose from when it comes to making shots (including one that has you time your button presses at the apex of your swing, and when the club makes contact with the ball), but for those out there that prefer the tried-and-true three-button swing system, developer Hyde has you covered. All the nuances of hitting the links — accounting for ball lie, topspin and backspin, adjusting for wind and other weather conditions — are all present and accounted for. While the franchise has typically leaned a bit more into realistic course layouts, fun modifiers such as tornado holes, mega-sized cups, and limiting which clubs you can use are par for the course, though to be fair, they are used sparingly across both Challenge and World Tour modes.

You can always play stand-alone rounds through Stroke Play, Match Play, and Wacky Golf (the latter of which randomly selects from those aforementioned modifiers, along with a few other surprises), either solo, online, or via local multiplayer. That being said, Challenge Mode and World Tour comprise the bulk of what Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots has to offer. Challenge Mode is a pretty straightforward affair, offering increasingly more difficult tournaments for you to tackle. While it’s not paramount that you come out on top of every single one, you’ll unlock more points based on how well you rank, and those points can be used in the in-game shop to buy equipment for your character, as well as stat-boosting items.

As you make your way through each tournament, you’ll also be able to challenge new characters to one-on-one matches. Beating them unlocks their scenario in World Tour, as well as the next tier of tournaments to tackle. It’s a fairly simple cycle of progressing and unlocking, but it’s well-suited for the more laid-back experience Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots is aiming for. World Tour is, in many ways, pretty similar to Challenge Mode, with a stronger focus on 1v1 matches complete with simple storylines centered around your ever-expanding roster of golfers. It’s by no means revolutionary, and some of the dialogue is the very definition of cringeworthy, but it’s a cute distraction, even if it is very simple for what it is.

It’s a bit baffling; at first glance, Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots offers up a cute and digestible way to hit the links that’s wholly different from the more realistic golf-sims from 2K and the like, but it does very little to ease new players into things. Accessibility options are virtually non-existent, and I was a bit surprised to see that you can’t enable simulation lines (to see the flight path of your ball before you commit to a shot) or turn on mulligans for less skilled players. Ironically, while your in-game caddie does provide the occasional tip, they aren’t that useful for suggesting shot types or strategies, and they mostly exist to help out with an occasional support skill, or to call out painfully obvious slopes and breaks on the putting green.

Speaking of, if there’s one area where Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots completely misses the mark, it has to be its sound design and mixing. For whatever reason, developer Hyde thought it would be a good idea to not only continually blast sound effects and dialogue, but layer these on top of each other. It’s not uncommon to hear three or four lines of dialogue from your player character, your caddie, and the crowd overlap each other. To add insult to injury, the dialogue tends to be pretty repetitive, with your character and their caddie picking from a criminally small pool of quips and cheers that gets recycled ad nauseam. Throw in the game’s soundtrack (which does feature a few bangers) and ambient sound effects like birds chirping, and what you’re left with is an absolute audio nightmare. If there’s one saving grace, it’s that almost all of these audio sources can be adjusted independently in the options menu, but it’s a mystery as to why the developers opted to offload that work onto the end consumer.

If I’m being honest, reviewing Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots comes with its own pain points, but very little of that has to do with the game itself. Yes, there are certainly some shortcomings, some of which I hope can be addressed post-launch, but my misgivings come from whether or not I should recommend it to others. On the one hand, I’ve genuinely enjoyed my time with Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots, and it’s likely that other fans of the franchise will as well. That being said, it’s difficult to recommend it to those who haven’t gravitated towards the genre in the past. And even for those who grew up playing these types of games, you should temper your expectations a bit. For every birdie or eagle that Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots lands, its head gets stuck in a sand trap just as often.

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