House of Golf 2 PC Review
Summary: House of Golf 2 is a gorgeous entry into the mini-golf genre. Featuring some a vast array of creative stages to get through, only let down by a lack of online multiplayer and little in the way of variety.
3.6
On par
I have a bit of a soft spot for arcadey miniature golf games. They tend to be creative, fun, and just the right kind of frustrating in equal measure, often straddling the fine line of easy to pick up and difficult to master.
House of Golf 2 by Starlight Games leans into the miniature part of miniature golf, setting its courses around the home, utilising household objects as its many obstacles.
The first noticeable thing about House of Golf 2 is its presentation. It’s absolutely stunning compared to other games in the genre, even when looked at next to some more traditional golf games.
Built on Unreal Engine, it utilises Epic’s full suite of visual tricks, such as Lumen to create a fantastic-looking game. The lighting especially looks great. It bathes objects in a realistic, warm glow from sunlight flooding through windows. Artificial lights cast accurate shadows and, when paired with detailed material work, create a surprisingly believable scene. The original game was a Switch exclusive as far as I can tell, so the move to other platforms has certainly enabled a glow-up of sorts.
However, impressive visuals come with impressive system requirements, and if you want the full fat, max settings, 4K60 experience you had better have a pretty beefy PC, with my 3090 Ti starting to sweat when running at the top end of things. Thankfully, this all scales well, and turning some of the settings down allows it to run well on most modern systems.
As you might expect from a game of this nature, House of Golf 2 focuses on creating interesting and generally fun (and occasionally infuriating) novelty golf courses situated around the home. There are well over 100 different courses to play, each taking place across a variety of different household locations. There have been some creative liberties taken to create interesting holes, I imagine most people’s homes don’t have miniature teleports to other dimensions scattered around and there are some obstacles that defy explanation, other than just being obstacles for the sake of being there.
The main game features mini-tournaments, with each featuring a set number of holes and a set of three trophies to acquire based on how many shots it took to complete the tournament. Progression through the increasingly difficult and obtuse tournaments is locked behind the collecting of said trophies, meaning that you can be stuck replaying the same courses for a while until a certain skill level has been reached.
I found that the difficulty ramped up fairly quickly. It was still possible to complete each of the holes, very rarely ever hitting the nine-shot maximum, but getting even the bronze trophy started to become a serious challenge, requiring multiple play-throughs to even start getting close. This isn’t inherently a problem, a challenge is always welcome, but less skilled players could end up stuck relatively early on.
Winning trophies unlock a variety of different golf balls, which serves as the primary customisation for the game, with over 20 ready to be unlocked. Along with the tournaments, there are also weekly events, and tricky challenges to be completed before they rotate out, with players competing for rewards and to be at the top of the leaderboards.
Local multiplayer is a nice addition, couch co-op is always welcome in games like this, however, online multiplayer is completely absent which is a real shame. Games such as Golf With Your Friends have shown how fun this type of thing can be in a large group, or even just with a few people messing around online.
Audio in House of Golf 2 is adequate, if unremarkable. There’s some pleasant tunes playing through the game, and the sound effects are about what you’d expect, that is to say golf balls hitting a variety of different objects. Beyond this though, it’s nothing special, but isn’t doing anything wrong either.
Final Thoughts
That’s about all there is to House of Golf 2. There aren’t any interesting modes, or modifiers to mix things up. Getting a gold medal in each tournament, unlocking all of the different golf ball variations, and competing for high scores (or low scores? It is golf after all) on the leaderboards is all there is to do.
House of Golf 2, is fun, if a little on the frustrating side occasionally. Despite there not being a huge amount of variety in the content that’s available, there is a lot of it. I found the lack of online multiplayer coupled with it being £25/$30 a bit of a deal breaker for me. With that being said if you don’t mind the lack of multiplayer and enjoy a challenge then House of Golf 2 might be worth your time.
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