As a golf simulation I find The Golf Club very poor. I am a long standing Links fan and I think the gameplay in Links at 13 years old is superior to this. All I'm seeing in this that I don't get in Links is a ripple on the water which doesn't affect the way the ball rolls one iota. I also find that it is very greedy of my limited resources. I can't afford a 'bell ringing' gaming machine so I need to live with what I've got and as things stand Links still gives me a better 'golf' experience than The Golf Club and if this is indicative of what is to come from Perfect Parallel, I don't think it will be worth my investing my few pennies to find my game stuttering and the menus taking forever to run through. I'm feeling very disappointed but I'm not really surprised although it is sad that a significant percentage of a diminishing playing group will be dropped because of their inability to match the system demands of the new games.
I don't disagree. I think Links is still probably the better game. That being said, the game is still only at v.51 and there's a lot of room for growth. I don't know how good the final product will end up.
The performance has gotten significantly better in the last month. It still stutters on medium, but not nearly as bad. High remains unplayable. The trees looks too "similar" and a hole with a large number of objects or water will bog it down. Still, there's progress here. At least I can reasonably play a round. But the trees often look bad - shaded incorrectly - and the system requirements remain obscenely high for a golf game.
The controller swing is still pretty decent, if a bit easy for full shots. I'm finding it ok. Half shots remain impossible - you simply can't take a half-backswing. This really causes problems around the green, where a 30-40 yard pitch creates major problems and a short bunker shot is almost destined to fly over the green. Putting is ok, though the last patch makes putting on a steep hill impossible. You simply can't putt the ball hard enough to get up the hill.
There remains other challenges beyond the half-swing. On medium or low, you can't see the putting grid on the entire green. This makes putts over 20 feet or so just a guessing game. Hitting in/out of the rough is wonky (but then again that's like real life - I just wish I could identify a flier lie). They instituted drops for hitting in the water in v.50, but they don't always work. You still end up stroke & distance on some occasions and you can't pick the drop. The wind seems to be overly powerful - a 5MPH wind will knock down my wedge by 7-8 yards. These are all things that would be tweaked close to release, so I'm not sweating it beyond the green grid.
Probably the biggest challenge right now is the lack of good courses. *Very* few decent courses have been released and it's exceptionally difficult to find the good ones. The rating system doesn't seem to work well enough and there's a ton of pure trash. You can't rate a course until you complete it, but you'll get a lousy course and you won't want to waste the time trying to get through it so bad courses often have good ratings because those who don't like it never get the chance to give it a score.
All in all, it's a work in progress.
