From the fairways to the wasteland

Dubai: I haven’t really enjoyed a golf game since Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06. I dislike the swing timers on most of them.

Tiger Woods 06 allowed the mouse to function as club head. Slide back and forward smoothly to a clean strike, speed controlling power and variations or tilts resulting in hooks, slices or heel hits. It was lovely, and highly intuitive.

Sadly, the series abandoned that method soon after, and that version wouldn’t work after I upgraded to a 64-bit machine.

Enter The Golf Club Collectors Edition. On the Xbox One, your right stick becomes the club head, with clean strikes and power rewarded with a pleasant ‘chink’, and any variation punished with a trip into the rough.

It is without question the best control system I’ve used since TW06. It’s time to swing out, mister.

The Golf Club is an admirably stripped-down game. There are no celebs, no skill system, no advice from a caddie, no spectators shouting, “In the hole!” — just you, your clubs and a delightfully low-key commentator.

However, there are also no real golf courses lovingly recreated, and I do miss my rounds against Old Tom Morris on the Old Course at St Andrews. There are half a dozen fictitious courses of various styles — woodland, desert, links and so on.

There is, however, a pretty decent golf course design system that allows you to create a course in a couple of clicks, or spend your time editing every aspect of each hole if you want. You can publish your course online — or access courses any other player has published. With enough plays, homemade courses will qualify for the game’s handicap system.

The controls — intuitive as they are — are not hard to master. I went from 27 over par on my first round to evens on my third, and by the fourth round I could confidently place the ball where I wanted it from tee or fairway. But as Sam Snead once said, you drive for flash and putt for cash, and putting remains a challenge, especially without an RPG-style skill system to make up for any mistakes in reading the green or striking the ball.

As well as a multiplayer system that allows a round of four, there’s a tour system that takes you from local club competitions through to international tours.

Wasteland 2: The Director’s Cut is basically the Game of the Year edition of last year’s Kickstarter funded offering. It’s a sequel to 1988’s post-apocalyptic Wasteland, the game that inspired the Fallout series, and it remains delightfully old school. I particularly appreciated developers inXile bringing back tabletop RPG designers Liz Danforth and Michael A. Stackpole, who designed the original Wasteland alongside colleague Ken St Andre.

You control a squad of Desert Rangers, tasked with bringing law to Arizona following a nuclear holocaust. It has an overhead, isometric view, and combat is turn-based — a system that will be familiar to anyone who’s played the first two Fallout games, or XCOM Enemy Unknown.

It makes for fairly slow play, more akin to playing chess than playing a shooter. That, as XCOM showed, is not necessarily a bad thing, if it remains challenging — and it does. It’s easy to lose squad members, and not so easy to find replacements for them.

Graphics are good, but text — and there’s a lot of it — is too small to read comfortably on a TV without sitting directly in front of it. The game was originally designed for PC.

What did surprise me is how well the controls have been adapted to game controllers — character skills are controlled by activating a wheel from the left trigger, and combat options from the right trigger. Standard options can be accessed through the buttons.

And the storyline is excellent, stuffed with mutants, moral and practical dilemmas and flavoured with sly, dark humour.

BOX: Review Scores

The Golf Club Collectors’ Edition: 8/10

Wasteland 2: The Director’s Cut: 8.5/10

Both games tested on Xbox One