Showing up on the eShop from out of nowhere, Infinite Minigolf is the first Switch release from Zen Studios, a company well-known for releasing an obscene amount of pinball games for all the consoles you can imagine. Did it turn out to be a good early sports title for the Switch?

The game revolves around what you would expect from a golf/minigolf game: select a player, select a circuit, go through a select amount of holes and try to beat all of them in the smallest amount of strokes possible. Well, you know the deal with the sport. With the exception of a few obstacles and power-ups scattered throughout the levels, there isn’t anything here that you haven’t seen anywhere else. The same can be said about both the visuals and sound: Infinite Minigolf‘s environments have their cutesy charm, but they get repetitive very quickly, and its soundtrack is just . . . there, nothing special at all.

Infinite Minigolf‘s core gameplay isn’t that impressive, to be blunt. Given the fact it’s a minigolf game, you already lack lots of elements such as wind speeds and types of clubs. All you need to do is aim with the left stick and select the strength of your shot with the right stick. Even though it’s fairly basic, it doesn’t mean it was well implemented. The right stick is extremely unreliable in order to detect how much strength you actually want to put into your shot, and it makes no difference by trying to tweak its sensitivity in the options menu. For as interesting as the courses’ layout can be, with all their gizmos and obstacles, the game’s core gameplay is just, well, boring.

Infinite Minigolf‘s biggest selling point is its course editor mode. You can create entirely new courses, complete with all the obstacles and gizmos you can find in the single-player mode. You can also play on courses created by other players around the world, which thankfully can be downloaded pretty quickly. While this is a minigolf course editor, I found it to be pretty similar to a course editor from a completely different game from a completely different genre, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and that might be the reason I haven’t had that many troubles with it. You see, there is no tutorial for this editor, no guidelines, nothing. You’re presented with a ton of tools and it’s up to you to find out how everything works. Controls are quite confusing at first and you’ll suffer a bit before managing to create an interesting course. Then again, once the course has been created, you’ll still going to be stuck to Infinite Minigolf‘s bland gameplay, so there’s nothing much you can do about it in order to make it a lot more interesting.

In the end, Infinite Minigolf is just okay. It does have a lot of content and a theoretical infinite amount of golf courses for you to experience, but its clunky gameplay and lack of varied scenery drag the game down a lot.

Given that there’s still no Mario Golf for the Switch, Infinite Minigolf might be a great addition to your library if you’re desperately craving for a cartoonish golf game. If not, just stick to the port of the SNK game Neo Turf Masters. Quite frankly there’s just nothing new here.

Reviewed on Switch.
Infinite Minigolf is available on PS4, Xbox One, PC.