Arcade Sidegolf

Many important figures have taken time from steering the course of history to potter around neatly mown greens, getting increasingly frustrated in the process. Golf, as Winston Churchill once sagely referred, is, "a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into a even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose".

Which all goes to make the game - and its culture - apt for a seriousnessectomy. In this respect at least, Arcade Sidegolf hits a hole in one. The concept of the arcade golf game isn't a new one of course, but what this game does so well is to distill the formula down into a simplified game that's perfectly suited to sessions of quickfire mobile gaming.

The action, as you can see from clicking through the screens, is viewed from the side, in 2D, with you starting at the left and attempting to make it to the hole on the right in as few shots as possible. You're given the choice of a wood, iron or wedge in order to navigate the terrain and the various hazards between you and the hole. Because the action is viewed from the side, you're never given any statistical data such as distance, wind speed, wind direction or even much information about the surface you're driving from. This is gut reaction stuff.

For that reason, the controls are extremely simple: each club has a trajectory arc you must position using right and left on the thumbstick - taking into account where the ball will bounce, which depends on the lay of the land.

Then it's merely a case of using golf gaming's time-honored device - the power bar - to gauge the strength of your shot, which is done by pressing the '5' key once to initiate a build up and then again, a second time when the slider hits the sweet spot on the power bar, to execute the swing.

Where you position the trajectory arc affects where the sweet spot on the power bar is placed, and the closer you get to hitting this when you take your shot, the more accurately the flight of your ball will match the trajectory you attempted.

To add variation, there are various golfing characters to choose between but they don't add any irksome shoehorned stereotypes. This is an arcade game through and through, so there's no bothersome dialogue to traipse through - the different characters simply provide a variety of strengths with regard to wood, iron and wedge shots.

The courses themselves are unlike any golf courses we've ever seen though - their oddly placed abysses and floating green platforms are reminiscent of a Worms battlefield, which almost lends the game a puzzle game feel.

There are no modes to speak of either and although there are a generous amount of courses to play, just constantly striving for a handicap does get a bit repetitive after a while. To that extent, the addition of a simple tournament mode would have been nice.

Visually, the game harks back to the best of the 16-bit era with lovely parallax scrolling backgrounds and decent animation, even if the foreground detail is occasionally a bit bland. The sounds are pretty minimal and though it's a minor gripe, there are no sound effects at all.

Even so, Arcade Sidegolf succeeds in being a competent if basic mobile take on the arcade golf genre, with the overall feeling being that the format has been combined with a platform puzzler.

If you are looking for something to keep your golf fantasies sated and your attention diverted for five minutes at a stretch therefore, Arcade Sidegolf's formula is bang on par.