Golf With Your Friends

Mini golf video games have a structural problem, and everybody who has ever played one knows it. You putt. Then you watch four other people putt. Then you putt again. The genre’s defining texture is waiting, and for thirty years developers papered over that dead air with commentary, cutaways, and increasingly desperate camera work.

Golf With Your Friends solves it with brute force: everyone putts at once. Up to twelve players, same hole, same moment, no rotation. That single design decision — which sounds like a shortcut and is actually the whole thesis — converts a genteel turn-based pastime into a demolition derby. Balls collide. People take the wrong ramp at speed and rocket into a lava pit. Somebody is always finishing the hole four strokes ahead of you and gloating about it in voice chat while you’re stuck behind a rotating pirate cannon.

Developed by Blacklight Interactive and published by Team17 — a pairing that explains the game’s tone better than any marketing copy could, and also explains the Worms-themed course — the game spent years in Early Access before its 1.0 release in May 2020, and it shows in the best and worst ways. The course library is deep and confidently weird. The netcode is not.

Its market position is unambiguous. This is a cheap-seat social game, the thing you buy on sale and keep installed for two years because it fills a specific slot no other title does: the low-skill, high-noise Friday night filler that your non-gaming friends can pick up in ninety seconds. Its competition isn’t PGA Tour or Everybody’s Golf. It’s Fall Guys, Jackbox, Gang Beasts — the drop-in chaos tier. Steam’s rating split tells an interesting story: lifetime sentiment sits well above recent sentiment, and that gap is the most telling number attached to this game. More on it shortly.

• Simultaneous 12-Player Putting: The headline mechanic and the reason the game exists. No turn queue, no waiting, no dead air. A full lobby is a scramble, not a procession.
• Three Objective Modes: Classic mini golf, Hoops (sink the ball through basketball-style scoring rings), and Hockey (drive it into a goal). Hoops and Hockey re-target the same course geometry toward different skills — power and angle over touch and patience.
• Sabotage Powerups: Optional and glorious. Freeze a rival’s ball mid-roll, mire it in honey, or transform it into a cube or an egg — shapes that roll exactly as badly as you’d hope.
• Custom Rule Set: Mulligans, ball size, gravity, and more. The gravity slider alone functions as a course-remixing tool nobody advertises loudly enough.
• Level Editor + Steam Workshop: A built-in editor feeding a very large community library, which is the single biggest reason the game has outlasted its peers.
• Broad Play Options: Online, local shared-screen and split-screen, and Steam Remote Play, plus a long achievements list and cosmetic hats, floaties, skins, and trails earned through play.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop is almost aggressively simple: aim with the mouse or stick, hold to charge power, release, chase. There is no spin meter, no lie calculation, no wind. The onboarding friction is close to zero by design — nothing here requires prior golf-game knowledge, and a newcomer can be putting competently within minutes.

What gives the loop legs is that the courses are designed as puzzles, not as golf. Each hole hides a shortcut: a jump you can clear only at full power from a specific tile, a loop that dumps you within a putt of the pin, a haunted-grounds gimmick that punishes the obvious route. On a first run, everyone plays it straight and scores respectably. On the fifth run, the group has bifurcated into people who know the skip and people who don’t, and the score gap becomes brutal and funny in equal measure. That’s a legitimately smart replay structure — knowledge, not mechanical skill, is the progression system.

The pirate ships, ancient ruins, and Worms tribute courses each play differently, too. Each set has a distinct movement grammar — the ruins lean on timing puzzles with moving hazards, the pirate course on verticality and drops. Hoops and Hockey then re-cut the same geometry toward entirely different verbs, and while neither has the staying power of classic mode, both are excellent palate cleansers when a lobby is going stale.

The Physics Problem

Here’s where the criticism has to be firm, because it’s the game’s most consistent complaint and it’s earned. The ball physics are unpredictable in ways that are not always funny. Most of the time the jank is a feature — the comedy of this game is built on ricochets nobody planned. But there is a meaningful failure rate where a clean shot clips through geometry, or an out-of-bounds trigger fires on a ball that plainly landed in play, or a collision imparts velocity that no reading of the impact justifies. When that happens on a competitive final hole, the laughter curdles.

This is the difference between chaotic and arbitrary, and the game doesn’t always know which side of the line it’s on. A designed hazard that wrecks your run is comedy. A collision bug that wrecks your run is a bug wearing comedy’s coat. The underlying physics remain loose enough that veterans develop superstitions about specific holes.

Netcode and the Recent-Review Gap

That split between warmer lifetime sentiment and cooler recent sentiment isn’t noise. The recurring themes in newer reviews are online connectivity and host migration — lobbies that fail to fill, sessions that collapse when the host drops, matchmaking that works better when you bring your own twelve people than when you rely on the game to find them. For a title whose entire value proposition is the phrase “with your friends,” a fragile session layer is not a peripheral complaint. It’s a hit to the thesis.

The other pressure on recent sentiment is the paid course DLC cadence. Individually, the packs are cheap and the base game’s content is genuinely generous. Collectively, a years-long drip of paid courses on a party game creates a coordination tax: your lobby can only play what everyone owns. Team17 is not doing anything unusual here by industry standards, but “not unusual” and “not irritating” are different claims.

The Editor Is the Real Long Game

Strip out the Workshop and this is a good, finite game. With it, it’s a platform. The level editor is approachable enough that people who have never built anything ship playable holes, and the resulting library — sprawling, unfiltered, wildly uneven — is where the game’s back half lives. Community courses are where you find the deranged stuff: precision gauntlets, physics-abuse mazes, meme reconstructions of other games. Curation is nonexistent and quality control is your problem, but the ceiling is far higher than anything the official courses attempt.

Solo Play

Thin. Deliberately, structurally thin. There’s practice value in learning shortcuts alone, and the achievements list will keep a completionist busy, but nothing here works without other people. Buying this to play by yourself is a category error.

The art direction is bright, clean, low-poly, and entirely legible — which sounds like faint praise and isn’t. When twelve balls are on screen simultaneously, readability is a functional requirement, not an aesthetic preference. The chunky silhouettes, saturated palette, and generous trail effects mean you can track your own ball through a crowd at a glance. That’s good design solving a real problem.

Nobody will call it beautiful. Textures are flat, lighting is basic, and the environmental detail work is broad-strokes rather than fine. But a game of this visual scope is light on hardware, which matters enormously for a game you’re trying to get five friends to install tonight — the modest laptop in the group shouldn’t be the bottleneck.

The UI is the weakest visual element. Lobby setup, rule configuration, and course selection are functional but dated, with menu flows that take more clicks than they should and custom-rule screens that bury fun options behind unremarkable presentation. The gravity and ball-size sliders can transform a session; you’d never guess that from how they’re presented.

Steam is the definitive version, and it isn’t close. Mouse aiming gives you finer angular control than a stick ever will, the player pool is where the population actually lives, and — decisively — Steam Workshop is the entire community content pipeline. Remote Play and local split-screen round it out, meaning a single copy can seed a couch session. If you’re choosing, choose here.

Nintendo Switch is a reasonable port with two structural handicaps. First, the smaller player pool: filling a twelve-slot lobby with strangers is materially harder, and the game’s comedy scales with headcount. Bring your own friends or expect thinner sessions. Second, and more damaging, there’s no Workshop pipeline — you’re playing the shipped courses, full stop, which removes the game’s best longevity argument. Handheld also compresses the readability advantage the art style works so hard for; twelve balls on a small screen is a lot to parse. Add the technical rough edges the Switch build carries and you get a version that’s fine for portable couch play and clearly second-tier otherwise.

Where Switch wins: local split-screen on a TV with four people and no setup ceremony. That specific scenario is the port’s reason to exist, and it’s a good one.

Golf With Your Friends is a game with obvious, documented flaws that mostly matter more than its fans admit — and understanding why they matter is the key to evaluating it. The core idea is a social accelerant: the design goal is to generate stories, arguments, and the specific noise a room makes when someone’s ball turns into an egg at the worst possible moment. On that narrow goal, it succeeds. But the foundation underneath is shakier than a party game can afford — physics loose enough to produce unfair outcomes, a session layer that fails exactly when it’s needed most, and a DLC cadence that splits lobbies.

The caveats are the story here. If your online sessions collapse mid-round, if you can’t reliably get eight people in a room, if the DLC fragmentation means half your group is locked out of the course everyone wants — the whole thing falls apart, because there’s no single-player game underneath to catch you. This is a title with no floor. It’s excellent or it’s nothing, depending entirely on who’s in the lobby — and too many lobbies will be nothing.

Blacklight Interactive found a good structural idea and executed it with more charm than polish. We can recommend it only to groups who already have their twelve players lined up and their expectations calibrated; everyone else should wait for a deep sale and a friend count they can guarantee.