Not too sure about this one. I played it for about an hour last night in single player.
I understand the gameplay reasons why you can't hassle someone who's trying to take a shot, but it feels really wrong to be a giant weaponised robot and not be able to attack another player. This is especially frustrating against the AI because there were basically no times where I was able to interact with them. They even appeared to teleport to the ball at times.
It doesn't feel like you're a big heavy robot, it feels like you're a regular sized robot and all the buildings are tiny, because everything feels weightless and floaty. It makes me wish it had some of the 3D Worms tech to be able to bust a hole through a mountain and do a trick shot through it, that'd be a good reason to be giant robots with weapons. As it is, it seems like a more regular golf game where you are able to destroy trees. I don't know what they tried internally during development, so maybe they already played around with things like more interactive obstacles to fight and found that they got annoying rather than adding anything, but it seems like the game concept is ripe to have some Godzilla monsters roaming around stealing balls, or at least weird minigolf obstacles. It's just weird to be giant robots with weapons and not be able to do anything with them.
Walking and jumping to follow your ball around the course works really well. I really love the idea of just trying to get the ball in the hole first rather than in the fewest shots. I imagine that works very well in multiplayer, a lot better than taking turns.
The anime art is very good, the character designs are spot on but the cutscenes that I saw weren't very good. They seemed to rely on the humour coming from the concept of being budget anime rather than from being genuinely funny on their own merits. The bad voice acting was kind of funny, but that joke wears off very quickly and it just becomes painful. Maybe it improves further in to the story. I'm looking forward to seeing the corgis.
I'm a fan of the McElroys but the commentary didn't really work very well. They spout something off just about every shot, sometimes even more often than that. The quips didn't always fit what actually happened in the game (non-sarcastic comments about "great drive" when it was actually a complete failure and didn't go anywhere), and the lines repeat incredibly often. The repeating wouldn't be so bad if they were generic "good drive", "ouch", "in the rough" type lines, but they're often jokes that are hit or miss in the first place, and when you hear them twice in one hole it's just incredibly lame. It would have been great for the more specific jokes/goofs to be limited to happen once per game session and to be spaced quite far apart with more generic lines taking the place after that. Even if that means later on in a session you don't get as many lines, it'd still a lot better than repeating jokes.
Do you unlock more commentators later? I couldn't find an option to swap. It'd be nice to be able to shuffle them or switch them up between maps to keep the lines from getting as stale. A slider in the options to make the quips less frequent would be welcomed too.
Speaking of options, it was annoying not being able to change volumes while in game. I had to quit from the game to the main menu to change the voice volume to be louder than the game because I couldn't hear the lines, then I had to replay some campaign levels because it didn't save my progress between each hole.
I get that it's a game made by a small team with a small budget. The concept is good and it has some good ideas. I think it could have been a lot better with some more time spent polishing the game feel though.
I'll probably give it another shot, especially if I can convince some friends to try the multiplayer mode. I think that'll be a lot more fun. Maybe it'll grow on me. Until then, it's a bit hard to recommend.