The world of sports games has hit some peculiar times. Decades ago, we saw a lot more titles that I could describe as being easy to pick up and play while offering enough subtle depth to be fun to continually come back to, all while keeping the video game medium in mind. I’ve not especially been a fan of officially licensed titles put out by many of the big guns, particularly in recent years, as they’ve emphasized realism and microtransactions. While the red plumber has been generally reliable at producing fun sports spin-offs, his output on the Switch left a fair bit to be desired for me. So when Bandai Namco announced Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots in 2025, my golf game-loving soul immediately swelled with excitement.
Everybody’s Golf (Minna no Golf) is a series of charming golf games dating back to the early years of the PlayStation 1, which originally began in North America as Hot Shots Golf (making this sort of a Resident Evil/Biohazard sort of title naming scheme). While historically a Sony Computer Entertainment property (usually developed by Clap Hanz), Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots was licensed out to Bandai Namco and developed by Hyde, who worked on games like Digimon Survive. It’s a series I grew up with, but didn’t keep up with past the PS2 era personally, which made me pretty excited to come back to give this next installment a swing or two (or a thousand).
What It Says On The Tin
Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots is naturally a game all about golf, a sport that largely traces its modern incarnation’s roots to the British Isles and which may or may not have been invented by a group of very angry and sadomasochistic Scotsmen. The goal of golf is simple: to shoot a small white dimpled ball anywhere from a hundred to six hundred meters (or yards, we’ll get to that later) into a cup buried in the grass in as few swings and using as few swear words as possible. Naturally, there are obstacles that get in the way of accomplishing this, such as rough grass, sand pits, water hazards, rain, trees, rocks, and whether the God of your faith wishes to reward you or punish you that particular day (usually the latter). It is a tense, but immensely rewarding game to get better at.
Everybody’s Golf is largely a series of three-tap/three-press golf games. You aim where you want the ball’s path to be, decide on how you want your ball to spin, and then press a button (usually A or X) three times to juice your shot; one to start filling the bar/meter, one to determine the power of your swing, and one to time your impact. That last one is easily the most important, as the timing of your impact press has the most, well, impact on your swing. It usually is a very tight window of a couple frames (i.e. tiny fractions of a second) such that you often will be off by a small amount even when you generally get the hang of it.
While the three-tap system isn’t as common as it used to be, it has been a staple of golf video games for a long time thanks to how accessible it is while still having a pretty high skill ceiling. I’m glad to see it again in Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots, because even nearly thirty years after I first teed off, it is still immensely satisfying to perfectly time a max-power shot with the ideal impact and watch my drive soar into the distance. There’s still a learning curve to the game, as you have to get used to how impactful the wind, weather, and elevation differences are for each shot and learn how to adjust your ball accordingly to keep it on the more desirable path to the hole. By and large, developing that good game sense to each facet (driving, approaching, and putting) is what allows this sort of game to be so fun and rewarding to play. Thankfully, Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots becomes quite satisfying once you get over those hurdles. The game also thankfully has quite a few options for setting your camera and HUD to fit how you want to play and make this easier.
The nice thing about golf video games is they tend to eliminate a fair amount of the annoyances of actually playing golf. The pacing of Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots is very quick, as you don’t have to chase your ball (a feature that some golf games added for some silly reason), and you can even skip watching the animation of the ball flying through the air to see where it lands immediately. This means that you can get through a front or back 9 in just a few minutes once you get comfortable with the mechanics. You won’t even get a sunburn, have to sign up for your local country club, or rent one of those funny carts!
I Will Not Make Any Golf Puns In These Headers
Once you boot up Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots, you get a pair of starting golfers to bring to a selection of single-player and multiplayer modes to start unlocking the game’s content. I spent the bulk of my time in this game on Challenge Mode, which is a rather prolonged gauntlet of tournaments and matches, often having their own little gimmicks or additional rules, but which fundamentally operate similarly to each other. These escalate in difficulty with each new level you unlock as they require better scores, give you rougher conditions, and have you play on trickier courses the further in you get.
The starting golfers aren’t quite all that up to snuff to begin with, but as you play more, you can get money to spend in the shop. This is where you’ll find alternative clubs and balls to suit your playstyle, as well as stat items to power up your characters, and of course cosmetics for you to commit crimes against fashion with. Doing well enough in each rank of Challenge Mode allows you to play versus matches against golfers to unlock them (or let you select them in World Tour), and you’ll also just unlock a few of them as you play the game in general. Most of these golfers are returning characters from previous Everybody’s Golf titles. Typically you will need to play at least one mission of a character’s story in the World Tour mode to unlock a character for modes outside of World Tour.
Challenge Mode is plenty of fun due to the variety it has on offer while sticking to the core game. World Tour sadly leaves a fair bit to be desired. Each character has seven objectives in their story, and you get some cutscenes and dialogue between them, which can be a bit amusing but are ultimately pretty forgettable. I typically just went there to quickly unlock a character before returning to Challenge Mode, and I mostly stuck to a couple of golfers I had invested the most stat items into (especially if I gave them power-boosting items given that stat tends to do the most to shave off strokes from your scorecard).
This game doesn’t come with a lot unlocked at the start, meaning you will have to play a lot of golf to unlock everything Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots has to offer. This sort of design is a bit more retro, but it encourages you to try things out and really invest yourself in the game. And the more you play with golfers (and their caddy assistants), the more you will unlock with them as you increase their rank.
Other Modes and Features
There are a few additional modes, some of which can also be played in local multiplayer. Stroke Play and Match Play are pretty standard, with the former just being about playing a course and seeing how few strokes you can clear compared to some AI golfers, while the latter is a series of one-on-one head-to-heads to see who wins or loses a series of individual holes. You’ll already be doing these a fair bit in Challenge Mode or World Tour. There’s also Solo Round, which is mostly the same as Stroke Play but without any real stakes. Finally, there’s Wacky Golf, which consists of a few gimmick modes.
Because Everybody’s Golf is a video game, there are still some very video gamey features to separate it from real-life golf, some of which are genuinely very fun. Of the Wacky Golf modes, Colorful Golf is probably the most fun as it hits you with a series of random effects that reshape how the game is played. The others felt like one-and-dones; for example, there’s a mode called Boom Golf, which covers the golf hole in landmines that just launch your ball in random directions. This is extremely silly, but any semblance of consistency goes out the window, making this the kind of mode best suited for low-stakes shenanigans with a friend or two that probably involve more beer than real-life golf already typically does. There is also a somewhat limited online play option for this game, although it does not have crossplay with other platforms.
This Ain’t Your Dad’s Golf
While the more out there modes are a bit hit or miss, Everybody’s Golf still has some neat little mechanics that are fun to play with and which you can see even in Challenge Mode. There’s the option for a “mega cup” which expands the golf hole to about triple its usual diameter, allowing for a lot more chip-in shots and easier putts. If that’s not enough, there’s also the “tornado cup” which creates a vortex that sucks up any balls that ever get within a 1.5-meter radius of the hole. While these sound like they make the game easier, and indeed they do, they allow approaches and chip shots to carry more hope, something golfers are typically not allowed to have after their initial drive. There are also some harder gimmicks applied to certain courses. This offers plenty of variety to the game’s Challenge Mode, which might otherwise have been a bit too repetitive.
Characters also have their own unique quirks and powers. Some are better in certain environments than others, and some have unique situational perks. I played a good amount of the content with the character Sasha, who has a unique perk of a slightly wider impact zone when swinging woods clubs on the fairway, which is nice given how tight impact timing ordinarily is.
After reaching a certain loyalty level with each character, you can also unlock a special shot with them that can be used a couple of times per course. These can have some pretty fun (if illogical) effects such as allowing you to ignore horizontal slopes on putts or have an easier time chipping the ball out of sand. Sasha’s is particularly potent, as it turns one golf ball into five when putting, and if any of them go in, it counts. Although not quite as free as it sounds, this is still pretty busted, and I do not feel bad for ever using it, because putting in particular is an activity that was concocted in the depths of Hell and has driven almost every golfer mad at least once in their existence.
Rabble Rabble
Although Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots is an experience that can be best summed up as “a lot of golfing”, if all you’re looking for is a fun golf game, it certainly accomplishes that. However, because said experience is so much around the same singular sport, matters of presentation and offering all the little bells and whistles are perhaps more important for Bandai Namco and Hyde to nail down. This is where what could have been an amazing golf game becomes merely a “pretty good, could be better” one.
The trademark of Everybody’s Golf games has historically been in their general goofiness. As you progress through the game, you unlock a wealth of quirky (if fairly simple) characters. I don’t mind the story mode being generally uninteresting on account of the characters’ one-dimensionality so long as there’s a fun single-player mode to spend time in, even if this makes that mode a bit of a wasted opportunity. What I do start to mind is how few voice lines each character gets, given that you will be hearing characters talk pretty non-stop. They’re real chatterboxes, such that at a couple of points they even interrupt themselves with overlapping voice lines, and while this can be a bit charming to some (and the caddies regularly voice some actually helpful information), I don’t blame anyone who might prefer to turn the voices off.
It’s a bit of a shame because most of the other sound design is fine. Series vets will hear a lot of familiar sound effects from over the years, and they work as well as they ever have. The music gets the job done, with a fair bit of variety to fit all the courses without ever truly being distracting.
A Thousand Papercuts
The visuals are fitting of more of a budget title, which makes sense given this game released for a relatively modest $40 USD/£35 GBP. The golfers have fairly simple models, some of which have a bit of personality to them, but others generally look a touch similar to one another (although there are cosmetics to spice things up). Sadly, a lot of the characters have basically identical animations when on the course, which significantly limits any difference in sense of personality between them. The courses are easy enough to visually follow, and have their own little flourishes throughout. There was some hubbub about the game’s page listing on Steam mentioning the generally contemptible words “generative AI” for specifically “tree and leaf textures”, but the most I can tell of that is the licensing of SpeedTree, a decades-old software for rendering virtual foliage.
What I can more definitively identify is a share of minor but noticeable glitches as well as technical and graphical issues. The game unfortunately doesn’t save your game settings if you change them mid-course, forcing you to exit your current activity for them to be set. Sometimes my caddy would start levitating, sometimes the camera would be in extremely odd positions, and at one point the whole game bugged out by leaving a bunch of lines from objects in the background on the screen until I finished the entire course. When there are too many other golfers on the screen (especially when you have multiple “dark” versions with their purple aura in World Tour), the game would lag not just in cutscenes but in actual play, which sucks for trying to time your shots. I also encountered a bug once where, during a putt, the ball, which was on the green, was strangely read as being “unplayable” for no clear reason, which I’ve seen reports of others experiencing as well.
Any one of these happening as an occasional freak occurrence would not be much of a problem, but they happened often enough to become something of an issue. Bear in mind as well that I’m playing on the PlayStation 5 version, which should in theory be less erratic than PC and run better than Switch. I still think this game is very fun and rewarding, but it could really use a quality-of-life/bugfix patch to really let this ball truly shimmer.
Personally, I also wish it had the option to convert to yards instead of distance for meters and miles-per-hour for wind speed instead of meters-per-second. This isn’t simply because of the inferiority of the metric system or because previous games had these, but rather because smaller units are generally nicer to some extent in calculations, and these are pretty conventional units for those particular measurements in golf, specifically in the UK and the US.
Verdict
If what you want is a golf game, you get yourself a golf game with Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots. And a pretty solid one, too, especially given its more modest price point. It doesn’t try to reinvent the sport, but it does offer enough fun means of play to keep you coming back, whether it be for a standard yet brisk version of this tense and rewarding sport or through the fun little gimmicks of special power-ups and massive holes to aim for. For a series that is rooted in charm and personality though, I was left hoping for a bit more out of those aspects, and it definitely could use just a bit more polish in several spots. Still, while they were annoying, most of my gripes were a cluster of minor ones rather than anything that particularly kept me from having a bunch of fun swinging clubs and saying “man I’m good at golf” every time I sank a chip-shot or long putt.
If you’ve been hungry for a classic-style sports game that still remembers how to be a video game, i.e. is interested in being fun rather than trying to simulate too many elements of realism, Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots offers a fine enough place to tee off.
EVERYBODY’S GOLF HOT SHOTS IS RECOMMENDED
If you like sports games, you might also want to check out our review of Mario Strikers: Battle League Football.
Many thanks go to Bandai Namco for a PlayStation 5 review code for Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
