Endless Golf (Wii U) Review

There are many games that have no end, like Tetris, Bejeweled, Frogger, or Puyo Puyo, which are easy to pick up and play casual titles. Endless Golf aims to be a low-friction casual game - however, upon playing it there is an alarming realisation that will occur; there is no lose-state. There is no end for the suffering that Endless Golf will inflict; it is an eternal sentence to golf purgatory, the anti-Valhalla. Souls who play it will fantasise about hell and yearn for the burning inferno, because by the time the poor devils reach the 200th hole, agony would be a release from the white-knuckle boredom.

Controlling the game is simple enough and is done in a similar way to how an Angry Bird is launched. A title like this without a lose-state makes it intensely hard to develop any kind of stakes or even care from the user, almost as if the game is a barebones, 2D ball-physics engine that was slapped together in a weekend and callously dumped on the eShop. For eternity, it's just putting a ball into a hole.

While Endless Golf fails on a fundamental level, lacking any real thought put into its game design, the developer sought to let an algorithm do most of the work by having the courses be randomly generated. This may sound interesting at first because it could lead to replay value since no two courses will be the same, but the reality of the situation is far direr. The randomly-generated courses are no guarantee that the level design will be interesting; too often there are mostly flat stages with little variation at all, or are barely sloped. Endless Golf has no point in it at all, since everything is eternal and random. Like the vastness of the universe it is a look into an unending void.

The graphics (if they could be called that) look like programmer placeholder art. This almost looks like an old Atari 2600 game, but with less pixellation or personality. The visuals could even be easily mistaken for MS Paint art upon first glance. Amusingly, Endless Golf does have one interesting visual flourish that illustrates the sun setting every so often to further emphasise the passage of time, which is also like the game mocking the user for sucking the life out of them. It does not get any more Spartan than this when it comes to graphics; the only way it could get any more basic than the plain green grass and baby blue sky is if the game was rendered in ASCII art. There is just no detail or any effort put into it, and it comes off as some kind of cruel and sadistic joke for anyone who pays money for this game.

Endless Golf is not a title that is recommended to anyone. Not to golf enthusiasts, and not even as a novelty so-bad-it's-good game, either. Games like Spikey Walls or Flappy Bird may be horrible, but at least there is a slight element of competition thanks to the lose-state and the fact that there is a high score, but Endless Golf never ends and it doesn't even have a way to go back to the main menu or even have a pause feature because why bother? The game never will end, and there are no consequences at all! It is probably the most non-committal game ever made. This is a free browser-style game at best, and the fact that Fanttum Games has the audacity to put it on eShop for $1.99 suggests that they do not respect their customers.