Official Score
Overall - 80%
80%
Although it's missing the go-karts and arcade machines, MiniGolf Maker perfectly captures the minigolf experience. The staggering amount of options (almost to an extreme) means that no two courses will ever play out the same - just the thing for those looking for an ace in the hole.
Road Turtle Games brings the mini tees and greens of minigolf to the world of gaming with their release of MiniGolf Maker. There aren’t too many golf titles out on the market today – does this builder have what it takes to come in under par?
MiniGolf Maker Review
With a tagline like “build the miniature golf course of your dreams,” you would expect nothing but absolute perfection from a title like this. Thankfully, this title allows you to do just that – but there’s a catch: you’ve got to put in the work yourself.
For what is seemingly such a simple sport (I mean, there are castles and loop-de-loops), MiniGolf Maker packs a toolset on par with the most complex of design tools. At a surface level, things are fairly straightforward – choose a spot for the tee and a spot for the flag, and work on connecting everything in-between. However, things quickly get far more in-depth from there.
For one, the object list is absolutely massive. Greens, props, buildings, and nature can all be tweaked to one’s liking, scaled, moved, rotated, transformed, and snapped as one so desires. Place something down that shouldn’t be there? No worries – undoing actions is just as easy. There’s also different motifs (including a much-welcome Halloween one), songs, effects, pipes, and even ball traps. Put simply, it is hard for anybody to get bored with the options present here.
The work that goes into designing the greens of MiniGolf Maker is a fairly straightforward affair due to its color-coding system: green handles move around the edge of the piece, red handles cover the corner of a piece, and blue handles take care of the curvature.
This might seem like a lot to take in, and it certainly is, but the game does what it can to make sure things are as streamlined as possible. There’s an in-depth tutorial that goes over the basics, and one can easily create simple courses from the offset. There’s also the chance to test out each hole to make sure things are exactly to their liking.
It’s just a shame that the gameplay part of MiniGolf Maker is just par for the course. Players can line up their shot and use a standard power meter to let the ball fly, but it lacks the finesse of the three-click system found in Everybody’s Golf or the more elaborate touches found in PGA Tour 2K21. Even then, it still has the physics needed to get the job done.
Although it’s missing the go-karts and arcade machines, MiniGolf Maker perfectly captures the minigolf experience. The staggering amount of options (almost to an extreme) means that no two courses will ever play out the same – just the thing for those looking for an ace in the hole.
