Poor AI makes the game far too easy when you're playing alone. AI opponents always go too hard for the pin with their approach shots, inevitably skipping their balls past the hole 20 or more feet. Also, the computer-controlled characters had a suspiciously consistent way of making their putts come up exactly 0.36 feet short when I played. The feeling that the computer was letting me win wasn't helped by the bad putting animation that makes a ball suddenly come to a full stop rather than slowing down first. Quirks like this manifest elsewhere, too. Chip shots bounce uncontrollably on greens that look flat. Special "fast fairway" segments of grass speed up the ball improbably, even making it accelerate uphill.
We Love Golf's roster of playable characters is instantly forgettable. You choose between boring clichés like Bouncy Blonde Bimbo and Nondescript Average Guy. Or there are the standard, borderline-offensive ethnic stereotypes like Tough-Talking Italian Dude (shockingly named Tony!), Flamboyant Spaniard and Repressed-Emotions Japanese Girl. My favorite was the Smell-His-Own-Fingers Kid, a young boy who inexplicably takes a whiff of his digits after every birdie. Other than his weirdness, the success or defeat animations that play after every hole are mostly grating, and sadly you can't turn them off. Each character has only one animation per hole result, meaning that as well as being tedious, they're often illogical, too. I got a bogey on the eighteenth hole with Long-Sideburns, Philosophy-Major Guy after which he made a pouty face and said, "This is not my day." Well, turns out that he had actually just won the tournament with a -10 score, so I guess it was his day after all.
We Love Golf's box also promises you the ability to play as some of publisher Capcom's great characters from titles like Street Fighter and Resident Evil. Well, it's kind of true, but also kind of a lie. Completing various game modes only unlocks new costumes for the existing characters. So you don't get to play as Arthur from Ghosts n' Goblins, you just get to put an Arthur costume on the Flamboyant Spaniard. The famous Capcom characters don't have their own unique animations or voices. Including them as legitimate playable characters would have softened the blow of We Love Golf's mediocrity; including them only as avatar skins comes off as cheap and misleading. You can also play as your Mii, although for single-player mode you have to unlock the ability, which seems unnecessary.
Bottom Line: We Love Golf is for kids. It's too easy and too average for discerning gamers. It may be fun as a party game with a mixed crowd, but so is the golf game in Wii Sports, which comes with the Wii for free.
Recommendation: Wait for We Love Golf to drop down in price to about $19.99 or less in used game stores. You won't have to wait long.
Chris LaVigne is a freelance writer whose magical wallet never runs out of lint or terrible driver's licence photos.
