In Dangerous Golf, without the albatross of technical limitations around their neck, the makers of Burnout take a swing at creating the Crash mode they always dreamed of. Fore!
When it comes to whetting your appetite, Dangerous Golf knows just how to lay the table. With candlesticks and champagne bottles to start, followed by teetering piles of china plates and fragile wine glasses for the main course. And for dessert? How about a tray of annoyingly fussy vol-au-vent pastries, each one costing more than your mortgage, and each one filled with a jam that would look fantastic smeared across the floor?
It is a gross display of extravagance. A final camera sweep across the banquet gives you one last chance to drink in the opulence before the round begins. At which point it’s time for you to waltz into the scene with a nine iron and raise as much hell as possible. Fore!
We’re feasting our eyes on the first stop on Dangerous Golf’s 100-stage-long world tour – a whirlwind journey from America to Australia that has you tee off on unlikely holes set everywhere from ballrooms to bathrooms. Along the way this deceptively simple puzzler packs in a surprising amount of variety, but if all the screens have one thing in common, it’s this: they’re all settings that beg to be smashed to tiny, irretrievable pieces.
It should come as no surprise that the first game to fly out of Three Fields Entertainment’s bunker is about wanton destruction. Carnage is written into the Hampshire-based studio’s DNA, founded as it was in 2014 by ex-Criterion Games alumni Alex Ward, Fiona Sperry and Paul Ross. Criterion of course is the studio behind the critically-acclaimed Burnout games – the racing series that didn’t just make crashing fun, it made it a prerequisite. A visit to Three Fields is a visit to the people who wrote the book on destruction… and then blew it up.
Having spent the past 15 years working under the thumb of big-business publishers such as Acclaim Entertainment (ask your dad) and Electronic Arts, Ward and Co have decided to blow up the rulebook to boot, branching out to go independent.
A small operation consisting of just a dozen or so employees, Three Fields obviously doesn’t have the financial heft Criterion had at its peak, but the studio compensates in other ways. The first is through sheer workrate – Ward explains that the company’s name is a reference to the way each member of Dangerous Golf’s development team has had to excel in three different fields of expertise, not just one. The other factor they boast is something there’s no substitute for: experience.
Chip off the old block
Three Fields’ numbers might be few but they include some of the most influential people in Criterion history. Chris Roberts was lead designer on Burnouts 2, 3 and Revenge. Alex Veal and Phil Maguire were instrumental in building the online modes and Autolog social platform for later Criterion games such as Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit and Need For Speed: Most Wanted.
Over previous console generations Criterion had a reputation for squeezing more from limited hardware than any other developer going, and our visit to Three Fields’ office shows that this resourceful team is continuing to innovate. Physics, unsurprisingly, is an area the team is investing heavily in. Paul Ross, who helped build the physics engines for numerous Criterion titles from Burnout Paradise to Dreamcast hoverboard racer TrickStyle, begins our visit by showing us clips of various rendered objects colliding and disintegrating as they would in real life, with the location of the impact, and the nature of the objects involved, determining how the doomed objects fracture and crumble. The calculations aren’t in real time yet – although that is the studio’s ultimate goal over the next few years – but already the early work has resulted in a more dynamic physics engine, enabling the team to create the Burnout Crash mode it always wanted to make. So, without more ado, it’s time to rev up those... caddies?
It’s clear that the team aren’t making a golf game because they have one eye on retirement activities. This isn’t the kind of sports sim the PGA Tour would put its name to, or even Tiger Woods at his lowest ebb. Rather, this is a throwback to ’90s arcade games such as NBA Jam, which use a real-world sport as a conceptual launch point but then spiral off into something more abstract and exciting, by focusing on and exaggerating the most thrilling part of the sport. With basketball and NBA Jam, that’s dunking. With golf – well, it’s not attempting to scuff the ball out of a sand bunker, is it?
“Why don’t players share their exploits in golf sim games?” Ward asks rhetorically as the French leg of the World Tour boots up on the big screen. “It’s because golf is a game of failure.” Having racked up scores on previous PGA Tour games so high that EA needed to patch in a longer scoreboard, we find it difficult to disagree. Dangerous Golf’s solution: you don’t play for par. At all. Instead, your score is based on how much damage, in dollars, you can cause over the course of two swings. There are four different score targets to hit – from bronze to platinum – and although it’s not an instant fail if you don’t pot the ball at the end of the run, it sees your overall points total halved, making it highly unlikely you’ll scrape much more than a low bronze.
So, we’re left with something that focuses solely on the two sexiest parts of golf – the initial drive and the putt at the end. The result is something more akin to billiards than golf, as you rotate the camera around the ball and try to deduce which shot is likely to rack up the biggest insurance bill. Or, instead of billiards, a better comparison might be Burnout’s Crash mode, but instead of propelling a car into rush hour traffic, you’re firing a small dimpled ball into a tray of jam tarts.
The wreckage is no less impressive for it. As we’ve mentioned, each stage is built for destruction. Ward likens the sets to the villain’s lair in a film – china shops that are just gagging for a bull to stampede into them. When you line up your initial shot, there’s no shortage of candidates – a priceless Ming vase on a marble plinth, maybe, or an elaborate chandelier that dangles over the table like the Sword of Damocles.
But often you’d be wise to forego the stage’s obvious charms and aim at something less obvious, like a cupboard packed full of trinkets, because your primary aim should be to whittle down the Smashbreaker tally to zero. This number differs from course to course, but is often over 100, so it’s quantity rather than quality that you’re going for from the first drive.
The Smashbreaker works exactly like the Crashbreaker in Burnout 3 – that is, it allows you to trigger an explosion within the ball, propelling it forward for a second time, except this time you have a say over the ball’s movements, dragging it around with the camera in an imprecise way that brings to mind Burnout 3’s Aftertouch. One functional difference between Smashbreaker and Crashbreaker is that there’s no time limit; once the ball settles, you have all the time in the world to line up your next shot. Enquiring about this change reveals a surprising fact: the team never wanted to impose a time limit on Crashbreakers, but were forced to because on PlayStation 2, if the crash was allowed to go on for too long, the framerate would collapse on itself. Not an issue here.
Taking a swing
It’s during this part of the round that you want to go for the big scores, steering the flaming sphere around the room like a wrecking ball, taking out the most expensive items you can find. Blindly crashing through all and sundry is one way to rack up the points, but canny players will take a more surgical approach. Pressing Y at any time highlights the objects on the field of play that are “grouped together” – in the dining table example, these are two trolleys and three champagne bottles. Hitting the objects in a single run wins a beefy bonus and should be prioritised over carnage for its own sake.
But as vital as it is to cut a swathe through as much as possible during the Smashbreaker stage, you want to make sure the ball lands somewhere where you can reasonably expect to putt it into the hole, because otherwise it’ll all be for nothing. You can actually stop the ball dead on its tracks at any time by pulling down the triggers, which is useful if you have a specific shot in mind, but you don’t want to make it too easy for yourself. While a safe, easy putt ensures you won’t go through the heartbreak of having your score halved, a trickshot that bounces off a couple of walls before sliding in will pot you an even higher score.
These trickshots become even more important during multiplayer player v player rounds. Whereas in traditional golf the trailing player is doomed, here the losing player has the chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with an audacious trickshot that sends their multiplier through the roof and compensates for a lacklustre first drive. The best way to play Dangerous Golf with a friend, however, is together.
Making the links
Think back to the Burnout Crash modes of yore: Criterion had always wanted to code a co-operative mode, where a second player follows up by ploughing into the wreckage caused by the first player, but technical limitations meant this wasn’t possible. Dangerous Golf finally makes good on the promise, and its co-op mode, which can be played either online or locally, gives each stage a new lease of life, with fresh leaderboards and ramped-up score targets to aim for. In co-op, restraint becomes the unlikely watchword, as the first player has to make sure to leave enough items standing so that the second can still reach their Smashbreaker target.
Like all good puzzle games, Dangerous Golf gradually introduces new ideas and twists to keep things fresh. As our time with the game was nearing the end, Ward enthusiastically announced that it was time to show us “the weird stuff”– which seemed odd, given that we’d actually just finished demolishing Michelangelo’s entire back catalogue of sculptures with a single errant golf ball. But things got weirder still, as we were transported to a later stage set inside a convenience store. Here, the entire nature of the balls we used had changed. Now they were sticky and glued themselves to the first surface they struck. They’re also rigged to blow, so after pasting three of these so-called “glue balls” where we thought they would do the most damage, we putted the last, normal ball into the hole – causing the mother of all explosions.
If there’s a lesson Three Fields has taken away from its time developing and refining Burnout’s popular Crash side-mode, it’s that there needs to be order among the chaos. That’s what Dangerous Golf brings to the party – as maddeningly random as it seems when you’re bulldozing through a row of urinals or splattering paint cans across an art gallery, there’s a perfect science ticking away underneath, through its advanced physics engine and its numerous watertight highscore mechanics, which make this a reliable and engaging score attack game in a way that the Burnout Crash modes never quite managed. If you loved Burnout Crash, Three Fields looks to have set up a superb spiritual successor here. All you need to do now is knock it down.