3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures is one of those games that you'll play through a
couple of times and then never play again. It features three courses
consisting of twelve holes each, but the only way to play through them is in the
game's tournament mode which makes you play all 36 holes in succession.
Each hole is designed to include a special shot that will guarantee you a hole
in one, but there's no way to practice a hole so you'll have to play through 35
other holes before you'll see a hole again and get the chance to try a different
approach. Making matters worse, the holes just aren't all that
interesting. Some try to be clever for the sake of being clever, resulting
in holes that are frustrating and almost unplayable. For example, the
carnival themed course includes a hole that makes you shoot across a bumper car
floor while the cars are wildly racing all over the track and another that makes
you shoot blindly through one of those spinning spindle rides. Not fun.
Each hole includes some power-ups to aim for, but they're placed so poorly that
they're not worth the extra strokes it takes to hit them. What good is a
free stroke power-up if it took you two strokes to get it? Furthermore,
the game's physics model is terribly inconsistent. There's no way to tell
if a swing will cause the ball to dribble forward a foot or send it shooting out
of bounds, and the results vary from hole to hole. The crummy camera
angles don't really this any easier as it is difficult to even see where you
need to be aiming your next shot. To top it all off, the play is
excruciatingly slow. There's no way to speed up the clock when your ball
is bouncing back and forth on an obstacle or when it decides to dribble its way
an extra ten yards for no apparent reason, and you can't skip the lame and
repetitive post-hole animations of your golfer. Luckily you can't see the
computer-controlled golfers you're supposedly competing against and so you won't
have to wait for them to take their turns. You'll only know that they're
there when you see their scores added to the scorecard after each hole. I
think that they have the right idea.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
35%. If this is an ultra adventurous experience, I
shudder to think what average mundane minigolf is like.
