GolfTopia Review

Golftopia is a golf park management tycoon game set in a futuristic world. It was developed and published by MinMax Games and first released into Early Access on the 21^st of July 2020. The game is still being actively developed and sets out to be a worthy spiritual successor to games like SimGolf.

Graphically, I really enjoy the presentation of Golftopia. The general artstyle is cartoony, which is very fitting for this sort of game. The textures and animations are well made and higher quality than what you’d normally expect, while also not sacrificing on performance at all. It looks and performs beautifully, so that’s definitely a plus.

Gameplay wise, you start out similar to any other tycoon game, slowly building up your golf park and then eventually upgrading to a full on resort. You start off by building your first golf course and clubhouse, which by itself could make you enough profits to continue if it’s set at the right place. The building itself is very accessible and easy to learn, but even if you’re having trouble, the game has some fairly in-depth tutorials and you can even turn off certain mechanics that make the game more difficult, on top of just straight up changing the game’s difficulty. After having a basic setup, you can invest in building public establishments like restrooms, decorating the park and hiring drones to take care of it. There’s an upfront cost and a maintenance cost to every item, so you have to be careful with your resources, even when you unlock extra items later in the game. The coolest items you can place down have to be the different obstacles that change the way your customers golf like bumpers, rings of fire, etc. Along with the park’s manager, there are always drones surrounding the area who have to take care of the different services the park provides and fight off the weeds that grow out periodically. There’s a full day-and-night cycle in the game and dynamic weather to keep each day fresh and a multitude of other features that are staples of the management Sim genre. Besides that, the game is still in Early Access, so the possibilities for its future and longevity are endless. Adding a slew of features to a game like this seems fairly easy, but even as it stands right now, the game is very polished and definitely shows a lot of promise.

As for the sound design, I felt Golftopia had a very synth and a retro futuristic sounding vibe topped with solid sound effects, not really anything to complain about there. Another huge point in the game’s favour is its accessibility. Golftopia is super simple to get into and hooks you from the start, its controls are very intuitive and editing your golf park is always fun. I’d wholeheartedly recommend it to any player, no matter their previous gaming experiences or age.

I also enjoy how replayable it is, setting up different parks and scenarios is a lot of fun and you could spend tens of hours just building the perfect golf park/resort. Similar to other tycoon games, spending a lot of time in Golftopia is very much justified. I feel as if this is the perfect game for people into Simgolf and people who are new to management Sim/tycoon games. It’s the perfect mix between accessible design and old-school game-making/mechanics. I really enjoyed this one and can’t wait for the upcoming content. I highly recommend Golftopia if you just want to take a break and relax for a bit, especially during these times in the world.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.