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100% Golf – a risky hit that strays out of bounds

Developer: Alexander Johansson
Price: Free
Size: 29.7 MB
Version: 1.1
Platform: iPhone & iPad

100% Golf

You can trace the modern game of golf back to 15th century Scotland, making it one of the oldest and most established sports in the world. Suffice to say, you have to have a very good reason to mess with golf’s highly refined formula.

100% Golf applies a subtle but consequential spin to the old golf rulebook. You’re still trying to get the ball into the hole as efficiently as possible, but rather than a simple hit count you have a limited power bar with which to do the job.

Drag and release to ping your ball

Every drag-and-release hit you take on one of the game’s compact, square courses saps a certain percentage of that bar. A hefty course-spanning thwack will take up to 50%, while a simple close-range tap-in will be down in the single figures.

This has a pretty profound effect on how your approach each hole. There’s less reason to be aggressive from the tee off, as you have the luxury of taking multiple hits.

Leave as much of the power bar while holing out

It’s far more important to be neat and precise, and to avoid the twin disasters of a water hazard and running out of energy, both of which will give you a 0% score for the hole.

The confined nature of the courses generally doesn’t reward hefty shots, which is a bit of a problem, because you only really get any sort of precision when you up the strength of your shot. This is another inversion of the golf rulebook, of course – more power typically means more variance in where the ball – but it’s one that doesn’t really sit well here.

50% will send you across the game’s square holes

This is a very slight package, too. The holes themselves are extremely simple affairs redolent of the 8-bit home computer era, with identical square dimensions, no changes in elevation, and little variation in terms of hazards.

There are only three 9-hole courses to play through too, with an endless mode unlocked at the end. You could pretty much see everything this game has to offer in an hour of play. If you pay the $2/£2 one-off fee to disable the ads, you might feel a little short-changed.

There’s a scant three 9-hole courses

100% Golf is a fun and fresh take on the grand old sport, then. But it lacks the precision, variety, and depth of content to push for major honors.