Under Par Golf Architect: Review of the Golf Course Management Game

The nature of most sports video games is obviously to try and recreate the experience of the specific discipline, but the market has always shown interest in everything that lies “behind” the mere competition: games that offered a management component – total or partial – on the world of football, basketball, American football, motorsports, even wrestling, we've had many. Less frequent – but still present – are those related to more niche disciplines, such as golf: in this sense, Under Par Golf Architect by Broken Arms Games offers us an interesting opportunity to try our hand at designing and managing green courses and sand traps.

• Game Structure

• Missions and Leisure

• Execution

• Commentary

Under Par Golf Architect: From Producer to Consumer

The idea behind Under Par Golf Architect is to impersonate the administrator of a golf facility: we can choose to play in Sandbox mode, selecting an environment from those available and freely setting the initial parameters, or try our hand at the scenario-based Career. In both cases, however, at the beginning of the game, we will find ourselves facing a large undeveloped plot with an initial budget to invest in our course, starting with the construction of a Golf Club and the first Hole. These two elements effectively represent the dual track on which we will have to run our sports facility: the holes are naturally the heart of the experience for the future members we want to attract and therefore the main source of income, but people will also need bathrooms, fountains, benches, bars and restaurants to eat and rest, training grounds to refine their technique, paths to avoid getting lost among trees and bushes, and even real shops or swimming pools. The management of these facilities will also require the hiring of assistants, instructors, laborers, cleaners, and gardeners: all “live” expenses that will impact our accounting at the end of the month.

The construction and management interfaces are based on two radial menus, accessible with Square and Triangle, which allow access to the required screens and any sub-menus, which are normally navigated with the side buttons and/or the directional pad. The most important menu is naturally the hole creation and modification menu, where not only Tees, Greens, and various types of Fairways are located, but also Bunkers, bushes, trees, rock obstacles, and even water hazards. Terraforming and paths have specific menus, while all buildings, from the simplest fountain to the SPA with a swimming pool, are grouped into a single category.

The Mission of a Golf Entrepreneur

The Career mode, as mentioned, involves a series of successive scenarios that we can only access after obtaining enough “stars,” from one to three, in the previous ones: to do this, we will have to satisfy various conditions each time, which will obviously become more demanding as the campaign progresses. So, if at the beginning we are rewarded for having designed and put one or two generic holes on the course and attracted a handful of “bronze” members, later we will be imposed minimums of “style” to respect, or the presence of particularly expensive structures, or even the fact of obtaining sufficiently high “reviews” from visitors. Each scenario also includes VIP guests who will propose special challenges, rewarding us with new clothing items for our Avatar.

Yes, because in this whole organizational setup, every now and then we can also shoulder our club bag and go hit some shots, which is also useful for personally testing the quality of the work done. When we do this, we can walk around the facility and try our hand at the various holes with the classic 3-click system: after aiming and setting the effect, we will press the button three times to, respectively, start the cursor, adjust the power, and finally achieve the best precision. The game also takes into account various parameters of hunger, thirst, and fatigue, forcing us from time to time to take advantage of the same facilities we have built for our paying members.

Golf Architects? Let's say laborers

Under Par Golf Architect is an Indie product sold at a budget price, so obviously no one expects AAA title quality. Nevertheless, we cannot help but notice how some choices are a bit subdued compared to what they could have been. Let's start by saying that the execution is simple and overall clear, with funny-looking characters where certainly no time was wasted on details beyond what was necessary. Unfortunately, however, it is undeniable that from time to time, especially when setting the speed to 3x – which is the standard when you don't have to do anything but wait for your bank account to grow – the system experiences cases of stuttering and input lag.

The creation interface was definitely designed primarily for the PC environment, as evidenced by the numerous icons on the edge of the screen that intuitively on that machine allow immediate access to the corresponding sub-menus; on PS5, it takes a bit of practice to master the organization of the various radial menus and sub-menus, with those icons becoming totally useless (why not remove them, then?). The game is also rather lacking in terms of tutorials: fortunately, the first chapters of the Career – or a simple Sandbox game – offer enough room for maneuver to experiment and learn firsthand, and from one's own mistakes, how to manage everything, but a few more informational windows would not have hurt at all. Finally, the soundtrack is decidedly repetitive, with only one background music incessantly accompanying us throughout the entire game experience. Positive note: all texts are translated into Italian correctly and with quite witty dialogues.

Under Par: Reaching the Flagstick at the Right Pace – But Alone

Is Under Par Golf Architect therefore a receptacle of flaws? Absolutely not. Okay, those limitations exist and are felt, but it's also true that Broken Arms' game delivers exactly what it promises: to experience designing your own golf courses not so much to then test yourself – the golf gameplay, physics management, and variability are at the bare minimum – but rather to turn them into a profitable business. On the other hand, the game is “all here”: going through the long and verbose Career mode is, in a sense, repeating the same game over and over again with a few more rules or conditions each time, but in fact, a long Sandbox session is enough to see everything the game has to offer.

The product does not even offer the possibility of playing in multiplayer or even just sharing your creations with other players: we create for ourselves, for the virtual members of our golf club, and that's it. If we want to challenge a friend on our favorite course, we have to invite them home and play in turns, manually keeping track of the results. Okay, we repeat that the on-course gameplay experience is minimal, but at least sharing could have been an added value.

But all things considered, we don't feel like being too harsh on Broken Arms: with all its limitations and arrangements to fit on a console like PS5, Under Par Golf Architect managed to keep us in front of the screen for several hours, stimulating creativity in an attempt to create more original or stylish holes and keeping an eye on income, expenses, waste, and weeds. In the end, the game's goal was achieved.