Fruit Golf Impressions – Wacky Fun With Friends

Gaming in virtual reality has an important advantage over its flatscreen counterparts from the get-go: it’s unique approach to gameplay. Moving your body around, swinging a golf club, for example, gives much more immersion than just looking at a bar fill up and pressing a button at the right moment for your player character to hit the ball. Fruit Golf, straight as its name says, is a riff on the usual mini-golf activity, hitting fruits instead of golf balls to try to get that arduous hole in one. With an even wackier commitment to unbridled fun than similar games in the genre, this crazy take on miniature golf is certainly making a splash, even in its current Early Access state.

Starting at a main hub where every available course is represented in miniature form for you to explore, a large screen at the center of the area allows you to personalize your experience. There is much more customization than meets the eye before even jumping on the field. Your avatar has several clothing options between various Polo colors, and so does your golf club. In line with the game’s theme, head shapes including a watermelon, pomegranate, and watermelon. These fruits, apart from being your face, are also the choices of which ball to take to the grass. Said fruit balls each have a weight to them that affects their physics and the power with which they need to be hit.

Offering five Cups to choose from with three wild courses each at the time of writing, each level is so different that adapting to every one of them is its own challenge. What sets apart Fruit Golf is that all courses spawn hazards that hinder your progress and will most likely spin your fruit off the map or at the very least change its trajectory. These obstacles can be moved out of the way with your club, but they appear so often that they will more often than not surprise you in the middle of a hit.

Each themed course is quite fun to get used to, as the traps are all in line with what to expect from the silly places you should not be playing golf at. Dynamite at a mine shaft, ghosts at a haunted mansion and tornadoes at a desert are some of the problems that you will have to face in order to win. As the goal of the game is to reach each hole in the least number of hits, this surely poses a threat that will derail the aspirations of the most competent golfers.

A highlight and what I am sure will keep players coming back is the role of the Saboteur while playing with friends. Fruit Golf’s multiplayer mode allows for an amusing spin on the usual way to play, waiting while others take their turns appropriately. Here, the game changes to a God mode view of the course, from which you can choose from a slew of obstacles to mess with your friends. As using each obstacle has a cooldown period, a bit of strategy is needed to know exactly what trap will be most effective to maximize your mischievousness.

Although Fruit Golf, as most Early Access games do, lacks accessibility features like smooth turning, it is a solid twist on the usual mini-golf trope. Its lighthearted appeal of themed courses full of unexpected hazards has room to grow even further to impress players even more than it already has. Best enjoyed with friends, Fruit Golf is a no-brainer to incite weekend afternoon hijinks.

Fruit Golf is out now in Early Access on Meta Quest.

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