Vijay Singh Pro Golf 2005

Mark Twain famously quipped that golf is a good walk spoiled, while Winston Churchill once dryly remarked that golf is simply hitting a small ball into a small hole with weapons ill-suited to that purpose.

Clearly, they hated it.

Both of those men are dead, but we can't help but wonder what they would have made of Vijay Singh's Pro Golf 2005. Without a pleasant walk to waste or an ill-suited weapon to wield, would they have warmed to the driven solitude of virtual golf? Teams of academics are no doubt hurling money and resources at that very question, but until their findings are published here's our own humble opinion: They'd have loved it.

Not only would it save them the trouble of stepping onto a course, it would save them the trouble of buying a DS or a PSP to play it virtually, because Pro Golf does it all on mobile.

As with all golf games, every shot in Pro Golf is more or less the same. As you stand over the ball, an overhead map shows the line of trajectory, and you can alter that line by rotating the screen left or right, away from bunkers and the wilderness of dark green rough, and towards the nice clean fairway.

To take a shot, you press '5' to bring up the power meter. Pressing it again sends the power climbing, and doing so a third time determines the force of the swing and brings the bar plummeting back down. There's a notch in the meter, signifying accuracy, and your final press of the '5' key should coincide with the moment the bar sinks past this notch. Gaming doesn't get much more one-button than that.

A good golf game makes you feel as though all of your shots are fair, however. In other words, that behind the screen there's a little universe with its own physics, and that the controls enable you to exploit those physics accurately.

After all, there's not much to do in a golf game except hit a ball with a club, so that one element needs to be perfectly refined. And Gameloft pulls it off with confidence. You never feel as though you're playing a lesser version of a console game. Without caveat, it's every bit as good as some of the better mainstream golf games prior to the first PlayStation, and it gives many more modern titles a stiff challenge.

Nevertheless, it's still just golf. Wind and range impinge upon your choice of shot, but you can play much of Pro Golf in a trance, largely because the game makes all of your clubs selections automatically. It would get dull fairly soon, if not for the gameplay choices with which it furnishes you.

You can play both as and against a range of golfers, as well as creating your own, and you can drag these around nine or 18 holes. There are three difficulty levels, and you gain access to each by completing a round at the last. On top of this, there's a whole economy of side bets, trophies, and challenges to dabble with, making things, in the language of impromptu gamblers, interesting.

Drawing its inspiration from classics like PGA Tour, Pro Golf deposits you at the opening tee of a 2D world, with every backdrop rendered afresh around the lie of your ball, the effect of which is both primitive and lush, like the close-up scenes in Watership Down, where the rabbits' hairs are visible as they move, or the music video for A-Ha's Take on Me, in which 2D and 3D bizarrely intersect.

While many 3D mobile games are necessarily barren of texture, the 2D environment of Pro Golf leaves plenty of your mobile's brainpower free to draw things like grass and trees in fine, grainy, pointillist detail.

Pro Golf doesn't lose anything by forfeiting the third dimension, though, and in some ways it outdoes many modern 3D titles. Certainly, graphical flourishes like the golfers' gesticulations of delight and dismay show that Gameloft takes looks seriously.

The sound is fairly busy – more so, in fact, than on many real golf courses. Aside from the swipe and thwack of shots, the game emits crowd noises, birdsong, and chirpy musical flourishes when you finish a hole.

Pro Golf has something to offer casual gamers, casual golfers, and dead epigrammatists for whom the insanity of real-life golf is no deterrent from its virtual counterpart.