http://thegolfclubgame.com/

This was released on ps4 today in the UK.

Had a couple of plays already and it's kind of like a no frills tiger woods. Seems fun and fills the gap at the moment for a golf game on ps4 until PGA tour next spring.

Anyone else playing?

I've been playing on the PC and am really loving this game. It's great to play a realistic golf game not one that allows you to put spin on the ball mid-flight or or any crap like that.

It's nice to play a game where my score is based on my ability to play the game and not what shoes my golfer is wearing.

The best feature of this game is the course designer which effectively ensures that there will ALWAYS be new courses to play. Especially since user created courses are available on all platforms no matter which one it was created on.

The biggest drawback to the game is that, as of yet, there is no lobby based system for multi-player rounds. In order to play a live round with someone they need to be on your friends list, and if you actually want to play turn based based multi-player rather than simultaneously, it takes forever b/c the game waits for your friend's shot to completely finish, then shows you a replay of it. On the plus side, the game studio's forums are filled with posts from people asking for a lobby based MP system and they said hey would consider it once the initial launch was completed on all systems.

Game support has also been incredibly responsive. I made 2 posts on the forums during the Steam early access period and my questions were answered within MINUTES.

The actual game-play mechanics once you hit the course are great. It is just a bare-bones golf game where the quality of your reads/shots determines how well you will do rather than how much XP you can spend to improve your player. EASILY the best golf game for the PC since the old links series was discontinued. Also there is no loading time between holes. After you finish a hole it will show you either you scorecard or the tourney leader board and once you hit the continue button you are INSTANTLY on the next hole.

Bottom line is the game is amazing despite the MP issues and if you love real golf you will love this game. If you want to pay $20 on release day for some superman outfit that will allow you to hit drives over an aircraft carrier, wait for the new EA golf game.

If anyone on PC wants to play some live rounds my steam name is Count 2 Potato. Feel free to add me to your steam friends list.. Guys on xbox or PS i think u can still play against my ghost rounds ( as crappy as they are)

$35 is a bit steep for no lobby based multiplayer or a long list of famous licensed courses :>

How do you compare it to like, Tiger Woods 08 (the last golf game I played before Tiger Woods online pissed me off the franchise) in terms of mechanics?

The swing mechanics are essentially the same as TW, however, The game designers have made a conscious decision to NOT have a swing power meter.You really need to play a few rounds and develop a feel for how to power your shots correctly. Like TW they will give you the distance to the pin and how high or low it is from your current position and a description of your lie (fairway, rough, sand etc.)and a percentage range of how it will affect your carry distance. The rest is up to you to judge whether the ball is above or below your feet and how the wind speed and direction will affect your shot.

The community around this game is stepping up to create the live tour mode that is sorely missing from the game

http://tgctours.com/#

Picked this up a couple of weeks back and what little time I've had to play and read the forums, I'm optimistic and hoping it lives up to its potential. As a lolold who was a huge Links 386 and LS fan I've been waiting for something to give the TW series a run for its money because **** EA.

Even if this ends up being a niche title - very likely given the marketing $$$ of TW and people's seeming interest in career mode where they go from being a weakling who can barely hit it 230 to a monster who overpowers courses - hopefully it will have enough of a following to justify continued improvements.

Some of the designs I've had the chance to play are incredible (the TGC forums is the place to get course recommendations). Gameplay is fair and passable - play out of the deep rough needs to be tweaked, and hitting off of slopes will hopefully impact shot shape as it did with Links. The course designer may be the biggest talking point, but certain aspects need work - it's pretty ridiculous that designs only have one pin position, one set of tees, one default wind speed, and one green condition, rather than being able to select from multiple hole locations and control other variables. People are forced to workaround by renaming each course variant. Very simple stuff that should be addressed. Guess we'll see.

If you like a somewhat realistic golf sim, get it. One can argue the $35 is steep for a download, but then again the courses are unlimited, the dev team seems very responsive, and some people get their money's worth just designing courses for others.

I wonder if this might go on sale via PS Plus in the next few months?

Definitely want to pick up at some point.

PSN Store has this on sale for $20.99 thru next Tuesday (12/23).

Good deal if the game is up your alley - a pretty realistic golf sim without all the powerups or need to spend any more money. I've easily gotten my $35 worth and am still playing. Some pretty incredible user designed courses are available, all for free of course. The HB Studios forums are a good resource for finding out which ones to play (http://www.hb-studios.com/forum/index.php?board=22.40 is the forum specific to completed course discussion). Courses posted will typically include screenshots and reviews by other users.

Still a lot of areas they could improve upon, but they appear to be paying attention to their customers and hopefully sales will justify that they continue to do so.

If anyone has this for PC and wants to play hit me up. Started out with a smooth 13 over on my first nine holes.

guess ill get this for ps4.

I might pick it up for ps4. Using a mouse is hard as **** and I don't have a controller that will work with windows 8.

Steam sale has this game @ $13.99 for the next 2 days. Well worth picking this up @ that price

I got it on the sale and am pretty disappointed, even after the six year draught of no PC golf games. I thought I'd chip in and save some people the trouble if they think like me. This feels like a pretty bare bones project from a few guys who are learning Unity and can program decent ball physics, and is a pretty big step back from TW 08.

Call it an adherence to realism if you will, but there are no lie indicators or the ability to target your shot with an adjusted power curve for the distance you're aiming for. Real life golf is much easier to determine those things visually than it is in this game, and you have no tools to aid you. The only aiming you can do is with the A and D keys to turn your golfer, and Q for a camera pan to where the ball is projected to carry. You can add top-spin or backspin to effect the yardage to a greater or lesser degree depending on various factors, but the current method feels clunky and imprecise. The overhead view is also fairly useless, it basically looks like a slightly more detailed version of something you'd see on a yardage book and doesn't update the yardage distances based on your current spot on the course. I suppose there's an argument that you're supposed to intuit a feel for these things, but after 20 years of playing golf games that are very mechanical in aiming I just get pissed off and a golf game should not give you less information and tools to work with than you'd get in real life.

The other major mark against it is the swing mechanic, which offers no visual feedback during the swing and only a cryptic globe with a red arc on it after the shot that I still haven't quite figured out. Like the TW games, it has a power swing system where you pull your mouse back then forwards, and anything not perfectly vertical will result in a fade or draw. I can't figure out if there's any timing component to it, if so it feels inconsistent. The swing power is also nearly impossible to adjust above or below 100%, which makes the inability to set your own aim marker with an adjusted power curve even harder to bare.

I have a million other nitpicks regarding the crappy and confusing menu and in-game UI, poor sounds, animation and graphics, and how samey all of the courses look with no licensed courses, but I could overlook those things if the actual golf were more enjoyable.

Yeah, there's no doubt it has a lot of room for improvement. One of the nitpicks in the forums is that basically an incomplete product was released and a lot of people don't have the interest nor attention span to wait for them to get everything right.

That said, it's still wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy closer to realistic than TW, imo. Not that one should have to play a golf sim purely for the sake of realism - I've probably spent tens of thousands of dollars on Golden Tee (NOT a brag) because it's fun. But there are so many ******ed things about the TW series in terms of realism that they can't be bothered to fix because they'll still sell X million copies regardless that I'm hoping that this or something else comes along to give them a run for their money.

Of course, that begs the question: how many people actually give a crap about a realistic golf simulator? Perhaps the number is extremely low given that Links LS had all the physics pretty well ironed out clear back in the mid-90s and no product has come close since, with the likely exception of the Jack Nicklaus sim or whatever it was circa 2000. Too bad if there's not enough of a market for it.

I don't know which TW games you think had unrealistic ball physics, but as a grizzled veteran of the Links LS series it didn't feel like a step back. This game though doesn't even bother to simulate surface physics, you'll bounce the same off a pile of rocks as you will off thick rough. And I haven't played enough to really tell, but it feels like the lie conditions don't have much of an effect on the shot, where in LS or TW you'd have to adjust your stance, loft and spin to account for it, here it just seems to add a bit of slice or hook to your shot depending on whether you're above or below the ball.

Never heard of this game before but do need a Golf game for ps4

I have TW '10 or thereabouts, and don't recall them treating uphill / sidehill / downhill lies any differently than a flat lie, which of course is a huge leak. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I remember being annoyed by it so presumably not.

Also, I have bounced off of rocks on this and the result has been pretty realistic. Maybe there are different types of rocks with different effects, dunno. They desperately need to fix their chipping distances though, things like where a 15 yard flop shot is super easy (and spins back!) but a ten yard flop shot is substantially harder because it's like impossible to get the right loft / % combo for that distance. And chipping is kind of AIDS because it's hard to figure out the runout distances properly. Stuff like that.

Generally I agree with you though, although definitely not on the course selection part. There are some stellar courses and due to the selection of themes there is quite a bit of variety. Unfortunately, you'd need to go to the forums to get recommendations because otherwise you'd have no idea they exist as they aren't featured. No doubt the overwhelming majority of people don't know to do that so the product suffers.

The more I play this game the more pissed off I get

It freezes the other screen in multi-monitor when not in windowed mode, and if you try to click on the other screen it minimizes the game into a tiny window and you have to quit out and run the config utility to change the resolution, and when I tried running it in windowed mode it either freezes up and last time hard crashed my system, which is literally the first time I've ever had a game crash the whole system in maybe six years over three different computer builds.

Not seeing a lot of promise from these guys, but it looks like they're the only hope for a PC golf game at the moment. Even if EA were to release another one they're still on my boycott list and Origin will never touch my computer again.

Had this on my steam wishlist for a long time and finally picked it up during the winter sale a few days ago.

Like the way it looks and feels (though I have this graphical glitch where the trees start flashing like crazy and my machine seems to spin up needless levels of performance to run it), but it seems like a decent engine without much of a game still. Hopefully the devs will keep fixing and adding to it.

Anyone been playing the TGC Tours?

I suck and am only on Champions Tour, but they seem super fun and super organized.

Just joined a couple weeks ago. I'm having a blast playing these tours. While I'm currently on the web.com tour, I hope to gain my PGA card this week. The people that run it are very organized and responsive. This week almost 700 people played on tgctours, and it's growing every week.

This game occupies all of my gaming time at the moment. The developers have many updates planned to continue to improve upon the game. I'm just a little worried that their sales will dry up eventually and they may have to charge for updates later on. I would gladly pay a reasonable fee, but that may chase away some more casual players.

Bump for general awesomeness.

Finally gonna replay the Q school for http://www.tgctours.com/ and see just how bad I suck compared to the rest of the world.

Just came across this thread.
Playability aside, what's the course designer tool like? I've been doing some schooling on golf course design and management and this sounds super interesting to me. Can you really build a course from the ground up like SimCity back in the day? Or is it more that you can alter existing courses?

It starts you out by picking a theme such as Autumn, Desert, Links, Tropical. Then you set general parameters for the course such as how much water, trees, and hills you want. After that you can alter Fairways, greens, rough, and bunkers either individually or all at once. you can sculpt the landscape piece by piece if you want to or have the program do it for you. The web site for the game has some pretty good tutorials that show what is possible.

http://thegolfclubgame.com/category/video/tutorials/