House of Golf 2 has the perfect elevator pitch: it’s Micro Machines meets mini-putt. Those few words tell you everything you need to know. Well, other than whether it’s able to deliver on that pitch anyway. From what I have gleaned from the first four championships available to me, I’m pleased to say that developer Starlight Games has, for the most part, done just that.
I never played the original game, but I didn’t have much catching up to do. As far as golf games go, House of Golf 2 is about as simple as it gets. You select the power of your shot, choose the direction of your putt, and let it rip. There is no timing mechanism, no undulating power bars, nothing of that nature. It is a pretty perfunctory approach.
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Which is also how I’d describe the presentation: perfunctory. The UI is simple, clean, and characterless. And you can’t deny that the music is, indeed, music, even if it feels like it was designed to be played in elevators. I wonder if that elevator also had a pitch in it? Needless to say, the courses being assembled from household objects does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the game’s charm. And goodness me is it charming.
While its very Micro Machines-esque aesthetic is great, a ramp being a ruler doesn’t functionally change how the game plays. If it had just been a stripped-down golf game with a fun look, it would be hard to imagine House of Golf 2 really holding my attention. Thankfully, the Rube Goldberg Machine style of stage design helps sink the putt.
Stages will have you hitting your ball into toy cannons, putting into cranes, and even rolling into portals that fold space and time itself. You know… golf stuff. There were times when House of Golf 2’s holes reminded me a little of the incredibly popular No One Can Stop Mr. Domino. Especially when I was managing to link different interactable stage elements together, causing my ball to ricochet between toy robots, before being flung onto a speed strip, which would then launch my ball off a ramp and onto the green.
Give us a No One Can Stop Mr. Domino sequel, you cowards.
The further you progress, the more you’ll see those outlandish interactables incorporated. After the first few beginner’s championship holes – which act as a tutorial – almost every stage includes a well-hidden, high-risk, alternate route to the green. Typically, these side routes contain a gold coin, and grabbing those coins will unlock different-looking balls – which don’t affect how the game plays, but they do keep things fresh. It isn’t always immediately obvious how you are supposed to get to said gold coins either, which adds a welcome puzzle-solving element to the mix.
For as fun as these stages can be, I do feel like some of them didn’t lean into those elaborate elements as hard as they could. Each tour ends with a showpiece stage that features a wide range of obstacles and interactive elements. They’re a ton of fun, but I wish more stages shared their scope and ambition. However, I did replay all the championships available in my preview build multiple times, so clearly there was still enough there to draw me in.
As is, House of Golf 2 is good fun. The concept of golf courses cobbled together from household objects paired with the unique interactable stage elements works well. It is mechanically simple, but that just makes it easy to pick up and play. The overall presentation is a touch bland, but that never got in the way of me enjoying my sessions. If the later courses build on what I previewed, I think it will easily earn a spot in my rotation of pick-up-and-play games. House of Golf 2 is most certainly a game with putt-ential.
House of Golf 2 builds on its predecessor with more than 100 new holes to play through, either in four-player couch play or online through live tournaments.
