An intricately decorated ballroom. A pristine kitchen filled to the brim with fresh food and clean cookware. A bathroom. You wouldn't expect the first game from some of the minds behind the legendary Burnout series to take place in these locales, but Dangerous Golf is a fairly surprising game.

There were many things to love about the seminal racing franchise (the blistering speed, the precise controls, the unadulterated exhilaration of the takedowns), but the crash mode was perhaps the most creative invention of all. Making a puzzle game out of the racing genre, with the goals of making the most wonderfully destructive car wrecks we've ever seen in a game, was an ingenious idea that was supremely enjoyable to play. With Dangerous Golf, Three Fields Entertainment attempts to bring that sort of chaotic fun to the game of golf. Unfortunately, this game falls short of those aims.

Dangerous Golf never attempts to hide where its influence comes from. The game has the graphic excellence typical of vintage Criterion games. If your golf ball hits enough objects in the environment, you unlock a crashbr- I mean a smashbreaker that creates a small explosion after it is activated and gives you more control over the ball so you can rack up the points. There are level-specific signature smashes that are commemorated with a photograph. Hell, one of the fonts used on the UI is straight out of Burnout 3. The game evokes the nostalgia of its spiritual predecessors (Three Fields Entertainment was founded by former Criterion developers). But nostalgia can be a double-edged sword. The history of the creators surely brought this game more attention, but it also reminds of how their previous games were better.

The game's issues are evident from the offset. The game's controls are shown during every loading screen you see. That screen quickly becomes vital, since that's the only place where the game showed me how to play it before I played the first hole. The controls are explained more clearly in an optional menu, but it's strange that Three Fields Entertainment couldn't come up with a more elegant way to explain the skillset of Dangerous Golf without throwing you in the deep end and watching you learn how to swim.

But the obfuscation of the game's controls may be a response to the fact that Dangerous Golf just doesn't feel that good to play. The way the ball deflects off of the dozens of objects seemed very random, and the detached distance of the camera made me unsure of how or why I was getting the points at times. It all feels weirdly imprecise.

My expectations may have been too high for this game. The Burnout franchise is one of my favorite game series of all time. Half of the reason I still have my Xbox 360 plugged in is so I have easy access to the Burnout franchise for the few times each year that I remember that there will almost assuredly be no new Burnout game for the foreseeable future and get really sad about it. I was sold on the game as soon as I heard that this was the next from the minds that created those masterpieces. If I didn't know the pedigree of the people making Dangerous Golf, I would just think it was a slight downloadable game that I wouldn't think about much in the future. But that pedigree does raise hopes and Dangerous Golf doesn't do enough to meet them. Hopefully, they have the resources to make another car game. That seems to be what they’re best at.

I hadn't heard about this game before the Quick Look EX, and after that my expectations were near 0. I really love golf games, and crazy style golf games with everything blowing up sounds cool in theory, but this from the get go did not look good to me. Sad to see it had technical issues as well, outside of just not being that great.

Yeah, it's a real bummer!

I love the look of this game but I assumed it was going to be like an actual golf game with clubs and a swing meter where the goal was to hit the ball into specific objects that would explode or shatter and cause a big chain reaction.

I still want to play that game.

What they constructed seems more like pool than golf, but pool with terrible ball physics. How do you screw up the ball physics in a game like this? That's literally the only thing the player has control over. It's like they created a bunch of cool levels and didn't bother to create decent gameplay. I guess that makes this sort of a tech demo, but one they are charging a fair amount of money for and presenting as a complete game.

I dunno, even without any expectation, it doesn't seem so good. One of the things that made crash mode interesting was the added variable of traffic etc. The rooms in Dangerous Golf do obviously have things you can interact with in various ways, but it's otherwise all very static. I think the other thing for me is that the destruction often looks really unsatisfying and weird because it's a tiny golf ball with presumably very little mass, so when it lazily careens into a statue, which then smashes to pieces, it just looks stupid. Heavy cars moving fast will impart a lot of energy, a golf ball moving not-so-fast destroying stone and wood just looks wrong.

The other thing with Crash mode is that is was one small part of a much bigger game. It was great, but it was great in small doses, in between bouts of racing etc.

I don't really think any of the golf concepts in the game are good either so I guess the hope is that all this is just their way of justifying the cost of building their own physics engine that they can use to make a new Burnout style arcade racer or something with a bit more scope.

The game could've been fine but the bigger problems with it have to do with how much time you spend in menus vs playing and how limited you get to smack a ball around.

The game would be made much better if you could have multiple shots or could regain your "stamina" meter. But instead you get a limited amount of time to take one shot with a ball and then you're back to menus. Watching the guys play it on UPF, some of the loading screens took longer than the level and having to select each level instead of just going to the next is a bad idea.

When hearing people talk about it, I thought it was going to be closer to say 100FT Robot Golf, albeit with more explosions... and less physics simulator. After watching the QLEX (and QL) I was completely disinterested. It doesn't look particularly great, or as fun as the idea of hitting a golf ball through rooms with tons of breakable objects.

My opinion? This game blows huge. Don't buy it. Steer clear. Hopefully a sequel comes out where the dev team realizes some story/reason/or explanation happens. This seems more like a vr experience.

I've tried quite a lot of tech demos, little playable experiences showing cool bits of physics destruction or other technologies, this game aims to give some structure to showing off destruction tech but it seems to miss it's first target... having impressive destruction tech. Most objects get knocked about in the same way things would in Half Life 2 nearly 12 years ago, with more intricate objects like statues and tables being a bit more breakable, but HL2 had objects with multiple break points on them too and i get the same impression when things break in this game. Maybe there is a lot more impressive stuff going on but i'm not seeing it, Nvidia Flex is being used in the PC version but i don't see its effect, it's not as noticeable as it is in Killing Floor 2.
Overall it's a minor but still significant issue, a game solely about breaking things should impress you with its destruction, however if the game surrounding it is fun that's totally ok, unfortunately flinging the ball around the environment doesn't feel good, the mechanics of gameplay and scoring feel tacked on, the destruction objects and their environments have a Unity asset store quality about them... ugh.

It's a shame something with a simple fun premise simply isn't, at all.