Everybody's Golf VR's devotion to (and immersion in) the ambience of golf transcends its simulation-oriented peers. As I swing a virtual club with one of my physical hands on a course populated by dinosaurs, instead of feeling lost in the abstract, I'm committed to refining and improving my shot. Everybody's Golf VR's affable pragmatism and judicious feedback grant access to a sport I had always considered too distant and aloof to negotiate.
“It feels like you’re there” is a response to virtual reality that is both miraculous and mundane. The nature of the hardware taps into the primitive parts of your brain and overrides natural sensory input, effectively changing the premise of reality. That is amazing but it is also a trick that has now been performed on my brain dozens of times. The first time I played Everybody’s Golf VR my mouth was agape and I involuntarily let go of the Move controller. It felt like I was there.
Like any other sport, golf has a consistent set of environmental markers. Sand traps, elaborately manicured grass, and boundaries dictated by coniferous trees are common encounters. I don’t play golf, but I jog though a local course once a week. When I stepped onto the first hole of Everybody’s Golf VR’s opening Forest Course, I felt like I was at Cherokee Park. The clear blue sky, the isolation and tranquility, and the sweeping vistas were all convincingly recreated. Everybody’s Golf VR presents idealized version of golf absent of inclement weather and cranky septuagenarians. Wind and time of day are its only variables.
This satisfaction doesn’t come immediately. Like many virtual reality games, you’re led through an escalating series of comfort and control options and cumbersome tutorials before you’re set loose. Your height, dominant hand, gender, and a preference to stand or sit are all noted. Skin tone, in what has to be a massive oversight, cannot be changed from white. Everybody’s Golf VR’s tutorial is also a lot of information all at once. I found it more instructive to learn by playing the game.
Everybody’s Golf VR, like the standard Hot Shots/Everybody’s Golf games Clap Hanz has been making since 1999, presents a version of the sport that mixes a simulation rule-set with and arcade practicality. A variety of clubs are suited for a multitude of shots. The angle of approach, which part of the club makes contact with the ball, wind interference, and the force of the swing all inform the path of the ball. Everybody’s Golf VR differs from other golf games because, rather than play with a meter in a timing-based abstraction, you actually swing the Move controller as if it were a real club.
The swinging action is handled with an impressive amount of feedback. Every shot begins in an anything-goes practice mode. Taking a swing reveals the direction the ball will travel, the percentage of force of your swing, and the swing path of your club. You’re also treated to an intended target position on the course, the recommended strength of the swing, and a club selected for the most desired (and least specialized) outcome. Pushing the Move button shifts the swing to “address” and now you can swing for real. Everybody’s Golf VR, despite its friendly trappings, doesn’t have room for do-overs. The shot is always the shot.
For my first few sessions, when Everybody’s Golf VR is limited to three holes at a time, I was playing it wrong. I was trying to swing the Move controller with two hands like an actual golf club. It made sense in my brain because I felt like I was on a golf course with a golf club, but it’s not quite the type of response Everybody’s Golf VR seeks. Only one hand is recommended to maintain control of the point-of-contact the club makes with the ball. Later, I would learn I didn’t have to swing so hard to achieve 100% force. This may weaken Everybody’s Golf VR approximation of the actual sport of golf, but it’s true to the technique necessary to play it well. You’re playing golf in the game even if you aren’t accurately reproducing it in your living room.
Putting, on the other hand, was much closer to actual putting. It’s one of the few instances where bashing the ball at full force is a bad idea, and it often requires a soft touch and a sub-20% swing. Calculating the wind, listening to the caddie’s advice on the slope of the green, and maintaining a straight putt are all essential for success. Like real putting, I did better when I swung with my hips instead of my wrists. I also found that keeping my eye on the ball and only looking at the hole after my swing resulted in a better outcome.
Everybody’s Golf VR’s physics and ball flight are fairly realistic. Shots that land on the fairway, when I can see them, will bounce a few times before settling down. Shots that land in the rough or traps don’t travel very far. Everybody’s Golf VR’s hills are unnaturally kind and my shots didn’t often roll into out-of-bounds areas like normal physics would dictate. The handful of trees I hit responded by repelling my shot like a ping pong ball. The smacking ping of the ball hitting a driver and the plastic-on-metal dunk when it enters a hole are both Pavlovian successes.
Progression is handled in steady increments. Four sets of clubs, three 18-hole courses, two caddies, and different sets of outfits for those caddies unlock with progression through ten player levels. Those levels are determined by points earned on the course. Points are in increasing quantities determined by a score on each hole. Obsessive stat collecting that measures the best drive and best score on every course, along with standard and daily leaderboards for each course, compose Everybody’s Golf VR’s comparative challenge.
Everybody’s Golf VR’s organization makes it feel like more of an exhibition than 2017’s fully-featured Everybody’s Golf PlayStation 4 game. There are two defenses to justify a potential shift in expectations. The first is Everybody’s Golf VR’s status as a $30 product. The second is the physical strain of spending an extended amount of time in virtual reality. At one point I played 108 holes in a row and I don’t recommend doing that unless you’re trying to write a review over a weekend. Standing up and swinging a fake club for two hours is actually tiring. My arm is still sore two days later (albeit probably because I was swinging it like an idiot for the first hour).
The three courses are a creative blend of photorealistic environments and surreal locales. Forest Course is the standard beginner course that could take place in any temperate climate and features a nice set of blossoming cherry trees. Seaside Course is a coastal course with inviting beachfront property and lazy palm trees. The seaplane that flies overhead on an early hole is later visible, propeller spinning down, on the side of a beach. Dinosaur Course is filled with actual dinosaurs idling around, from triceratops feeding on grass to a tyrannosaurs rex roaring when you’re trying to sink a put next to an active lava flow. It’s hilarious, and joins Valora Valley Golf as the only golf game with an active volcano on the course.
A caddie is always present to fill Everybody’s Golf VR with advice and personality. The first time you play you’re defaulted into an uncomfortable meet-and-greet with Riko outside the club house (and it can be skipped every time afterward). On the course Riko is always quick to offer advice. “The ball’s above your feet so it might pull left,” and, when I was on a slope, “your left foot is raised so the shot might go little high,” were both instrumental in honing my shot. The second caddie, Lucy, doesn’t have the greatest voice direction attached to her character but she offers identical advice. “…it’s in the rough” was always a more congenial way of saying “that shot sucked, dude.” Both caddies are always positive.
Everybody’s Golf VR’s caddie situation gets weird. Present are strange, seemingly at random sequences where you will join the caddie on a little break. The review guidelines state I can’t mention what these entail but some are creepy and some are actually funny. Different caddie outfits are unlockable. This was fine until I unlocked a nice dress for Riko that was oddly localized with: “An outfit with a lovely fresh feeling. Is there anything more romantic than golfing with an angelic beauty by your side?” What the hell is this? Why is it here? Why do I need to simulate romantic feelings with my caddie? This feels creepy and wildly out of place.
The first time I played 18 holes in Everybody’s Golf VR I shot a +36. 0 is an ideal score for golf, so this was appalling. I was driving without concern for direction and putting like Happy Gilmore. By the time I had earned the 300-hole trophy, I was shooting +3 to +5 on the first two courses. When I first played Everybody’s Golf VR and saw how much technique was necessary to put the ball in the right place, I thought scoring well would be impossible. I couldn’t imagine a sport and a videogame merging a similar set of skills, even if both are ultimately games.
The more I played, the more I began to see Everybody’s Golf VR as a collection of odds that I could manipulate in my favor. I understood that the force and direction of my putt affected its curve more severely from longer distances. I got that sand traps, which are positioned in obvious spots, are impossible to escape with decent drives. Balls driven out of the rough travel shorter distances than fairways drives. This is all super obvious stuff if you’ve ever played golf but, having not done that, it’s the only way it made sense to me as a “game.”
My sixty-four-year-old father has played golf dozens of times a year for fifty years. Like the time I asked my mother, who spent some of her nursing career in the emergency room, her thoughts about Surgeon Simulator 2013, I thought it would be enlightening to let my dad inside of Everybody’s Golf VR. For the record the only time he plays games is when my wife and I put him in Driveclub VR (“This is making me sick”), Job Simulator (he pelted people with food) and Skyrim VR (he burned everyone in the town alive with fire from his hands).
The first time he played we went through the usual round of “…this is incredible” childlike enthusiasm. He took his time to look around the opening hole and familiarize himself with the Everybody’s Golf VR’s basics. It took a while. He was complimentary of the physics, stating “…your swing path has to be straight. You have to swing through the ball. If you go through the ball and swing right or left the ball’s going to fade or hook.” He also thought the putting sequences were “extremely realistic.”
He was more critical of the PlayStation VR hardware’s clear deficiencies. “They need to improve those graphics for long distances; it’s way too fuzzy,” was met with my failed attempts to describe the PlayStation 4’s under-powered tech and the headset’s low resolution. He ached for increased realism, recalling the time we showed him Horizon Zero Dawn, stating, “If they had graphics like that, that son of a bitch would be off the chart. I would go buy this thing.” He was also creeped out by the caddie situation, but conceded Riko’s advice was on point and “probably good for kids or whatever.” The experience, generally, was felt as positive.
A firework shoots out of the hole when you get an eagle. When I managed to do this—from a chip shot in the mid-rough on a par 5—the feeling of elation was a nice contrast from when I first started playing Everybody’s Golf VR and wished the green was modeled to respond my frustration when I repeatedly bludgeoned the ground with my putter. The eagle felt rewarding, like the product of a real and learned skill. I didn’t think virtual reality, and especially Sony’s Move controllers, had the capacity to develop precision techniques with their loose level of control. Everybody’s Golf VR, with time, proved that expectation wrong.
Everybody’s Golf VR’s devotion to (and immersion in) the ambience of golf transcends its simulation-oriented peers. As I swing a virtual club with one of my physical hands on a course populated by dinosaurs, instead of feeling lost in the abstract, I’m committed to refining and improving my shot. Everybody’s Golf VR‘s affable pragmatism and judicious feedback grant access to a sport I had always considered too distant and aloof to negotiate.
