Golf may very well be one of the most underrated videogame sports. I blame my own lack of interest in them on the fact that so many of them are stuffed with real-life golfers—celebrities to some, sure, but to me they’re mostly random geezers.
Then, there’s Everybody’s Golf. It’s a series that’s been around since the late ’90s, and it’s bloody fantastic. It combines a more relaxed, cartoonish presentation with really solid, realistic physics and movement. It’s a real sleeper agent of the golf game hive thanks to that, but it’s been the only series where I’ve legitimately enjoyed swinging a metal club at a ball over and over again.
The series has never actually made its way to PC, and I’d feared the whole thing had died since we haven’t actually had an entry since 2017’s Everybody’s Golf on the PlayStation 4.
But then. But then. The latest Nintendo Direct happened—these things are starting to get pretty lucrative for PC gamers too, mind, with a lot of the announcements usually crossing over to PC—and we were blessed with a brand new entry in Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots. Better yet, the damn thing’s even coming to Steam, marking it as the first Everybody’s Golf game to actually make its way to our humble desktops.
I am, for one, irrationally excited about this news. Something about teeing off the freeway as an outlandish anime man really hits the spot, and with our own editor-in-chief Phil Savage being a fellow Everybody’s Golf fan, I at least know there’ll be two of us buying the game when it launches.
(Image credit: Bandai Namco)
The only thing I’m hesitant about right now is the fact that longtime developer Clap Hanz isn’t at the wheel this time: Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots is instead being developed by Hyde Inc. It’s not like new developers haven’t been able to take charge of a pre-existing series before and turn it into something incredible—cough Baldur’s Gate 3 cough—so hopefully it’s more of a minor concern, since the trailer still feels distinctly Everybody’s Golf-like.
There’s no specific launch date yet, but we do at least know the game’ll be out this year. There’ll be singleplayer, online and couch co-op, and a new ‘Wacky Golf’ mode which promises interesting new challenges to undertake. Hopefully I’ll catch some of you out there on the green.
