Preview: Golftopia (Steam Early Access)

by Jim Smale · Published July 29, 2020 · Updated July 29, 2020

DESIGN, BUILD, and MANAGE your own futuristic golf course. Keep 200 persistent visitors fed, hydrated, and happy. Defend your creation from a growing infestation of weeds with robotic workers and defensive turrets. Evolve your course into a mega-resort where nobody wants to go home, EVER!

Pros:

Nice colorful graphics.
527mb Download size.
Steam achievements.
Graphics-fullscreen, resolution, v-sync, terrain/grass quality, anti-aliasing, TAA, shadow range, level of detail range, and FXAA.
Scroll/zoom/rotation speed slider.
Autosave interval slider.
Tutorial-on/off.
Island creation-water/hill/mountains/grass/rocks/weeds slider for how much of it you want. Set the temperature or use a seed number to generate. The course is split into 9 chunks and you can edit each chunk.
The difficulty is set by 3 settings-economic, weed and membership difficulty and goes on a very easy to hard slider.
Extra modes- pay to change the ground type and pay to change terrain height and set to off or on.
The tutorial is nonintrusive and there if you need it, pretty much highlights options and points you to a database of hints and tips.
Golf course sim gameplay.
Create and manage your own golf resort.
Free reign to place the hole and tee wherever you like, the game will auto set the par, average playtime, etc but you can adjust challenge/difficulty, craziness, lighting, and decoration.
Map-can zoom in and out and even watch people play golf!
Instant feedback on visitor’s experiences and how well things are performing.
Day/night cycle.
Powerful terrain editors-can easily lower and higher the ground, add new terrain types like grass and fairway and all in real-time.
Various game speeds-slow/normal/fast.
Play your own course! Send a manager out for an in-depth look at how your course fairs.
Play how you want.
Quick to action.
Fascinating to just people watch.
Can open/close holes/facilities on a one by one basis.
At night the Golf balls and terrain will glow neon colors so you and the golfers can see and still play.
Obviously it’s like Sim City, Two-point hospital.
Edit your managers-body type, weight, clothing, skin color, hairstyle and color, head shape, and extras.
Clubhouse-you can upgrade it 5 stars and each level up grants 3 additional holes, the ability to raise membership prices, and unlock new prestigious buildings/items.
Can make crazy golf holes.
Transport tubes for moving people around.
Drones-your workforce who will auto-complete tasks like restocking machines or pulling weeds.
Weeds will take over and obstruct the golf. Weeds will appear more frequently when it’s raining but also sprout randomly for every visitor complaint.
Clear icon-driven Hud and UI.
It’s easy to get going.
A bar at the bottom represents each visitor and will change colors depending on their mood, clicking one will take you to them whereas hovering over the icon will reveal their name.
A handy icon will pop up showing what structures are not being used and take you to them for easy deletion or fix.
The course overview will give you a breakdown and rating of your resort.
Awards are given for many reasons and give good bonuses.
Golfer registry will show the name of every golfer who has visited your resort.
Finances breakdown as well as a daily pop up of income and expenditure.
Can look at heat maps for complaints, ball landings, and weeds.
Cheats menu-100 dollars/1 million dollars/max orbital power/kill all weeds and upgrade clubhouse.
Orbital powers-pay to do God-like adjustments like take money from golfers or make golfers better, destroy weeds.
Estate-you start off with one bit of land then buy more as you earn the cash.
The soundtrack is a splattering of genres.

Cons:

The very cold open with you opening the game to island creation then you jump in, the tutorial stuff is missable at first.
Difficult.
Had a few issues with deleting holes and tees where replacements wouldn’t link up and I had to delete both and start again.
No downside to using cheats.
Very small text and especially apparent when trying to read the tutorial text up in the top right.
No controller support.
Navigating the resort is not as smooth as it could be.
Takes time to get used to the terrain tools.
No quick easy way to undo adjustments.
Cant do a load of placements in a row, you have to click back into the menu every time.
Absolute time killer.

Summary

Golftopia is a sim game whereby you build and run your own golf resort. It starts off very cold with you being greeted with a load of island creation settings, no word on why and where you should do things, eventually, you make it into the game and again it’s a small notification for tutorial help, it’s fine once you realize bit I missed it for a while first time round. Outside of that, I could not stop playing, the game is so easy to learn regardless of pop-ups and help. You have total control and can mess around with the terrain, build menacing holes (phrasing) and even build crazy golf-style holes and in mere seconds. Build tunnels to make navigation for your visitors easier, feed and hydrate your visitors, earn cash and upgrade your clubhouse to get more toys and up your membership prices, it’s an endless loop of greed and creation and I love it. When it goes dark by the way, the course elements like the green and fairway will highlight in neon colors and it looks real good. It’s a shame you can’t physically play the holes and instead send your manager but man oh man does this gameplay well. I would like to see more toys and some sort of hole control (phrasing again) or creation help to make more intricate holes. As it’s still in early access anything can happen but at the moment there is more than enough content to ruin your productivity!