Designing an attractive, profitable golf course is obviously no mean feat. Simply creating 18 quality holes that will lure golfers away from their favorite links and keep them coming back for more is challenging enough; toss in all the other aspects of a successful resort--restaurants, tennis and racquetball courts, guest accommodations, a myriad of maintenance facilities, and more--and you can readily appreciate how much time and careful planning are involved in the process. Those are the sorts of complexities that lie at the heart of any good business simulation, and on first impression, Golf Resort Tycoon seems to have all the bases covered--if you've seen it in a fancy real-life resort, chances are you'll be able to build it in this business simulation. Where Golf Resort Tycoon deviates from real life is that the entire process takes place in real time. Instead of having all the holes and buildings in place before opening the gates to your virtual resort, you must construct your vacation spot bit by bit, as duffers who apparently don't mind visiting a golf course with only two or three holes wander about the premises complaining about the lack of entertainment.
Golf Resort Tycoon includes two game modes. The instant action mode lets you choose from one of five locales--forest, mountain, island, desert, and "autumn," which is a more dense version of forest but with brightly colored leaves--and lets you build up your golfing haven without worrying about set objectives. On the other hand, the game's dozen challenges present you with specific goals you must achieve, ranging from straightforward (build an 18-hole course with at least 28 hazards) to complex (develop a resort worthy of media coverage, then hire a film crew to cover special events). Difficulty is determined by how much cash you have on hand as construction begins, from 50 large in easy mode to a pitiful 10 grand when you play on the hard setting.
Don't expect to be able to take that $50,000 and throw up a pro shop and nice restaurant right off the bat. Golf Resort Tycoon forces you to build structures in a certain order, and some of the requirements don't seem to make sense. Why do you need a first-aid center in place before you can build a putting green? Why must you have a portable toilet in order to build a bakery stand when you've already constructed a full-service restroom and torn down the portable toilets you erected earlier? You also need a beer garden before you can build a golf-cart racetrack. You need to use the "compound" surrounding the clubhouse as placement areas for minor buildings such as maintenance or pest control. Speaking of pest control, it's inexplicably found under the medical buildings icon.
Once you do get accustomed to these interface issues, you'll find yourself your plopping down buildings quickly and easily, but if you're not careful, you'll find yourself suffering from the links version of urban sprawl. The obvious solution is to tear down buildings that are redundant, but you've got to be careful because of the building restrictions. If you remove all the tiny groundskeeping shacks once you've got a larger advanced groundskeeping building, you'll find you can't build a second advanced groundskeeping building because you need to have at least one little groundskeeping building still standing to do so.
As far as course design goes, don't expect the advanced course architects you'd find in regular golf simulations. About all you can do in Golf Resort Tycoon is pick a tee spot and make crude adjustments to fairway width and direction. Instead of being able to smoothly rotate the view, you're limited to 90-degree rotations when viewing your resort, and objects such as bunkers and water hazards can only be rotated 180 degrees before placement. Still, the results are generally acceptable, and making hole design any more complex would probably be overwhelming since you must do it on the fly.
Once your operation is running, you can select any golfer and see what he or she is doing and how he or she feels about the facilities. You can also grab them and drop them down anywhere you like (a trick you can use with maintenance personnel to speed up repairs), and an option to access a first-person view lets you espy things from their perspective. This may sound interesting, but in practice it's actually fun for all of about 30 seconds.
There's plenty to do to stay on top of things, but the Achilles heel of Golf Resort Tycoon is that not much happens for long, long stretches of time--except for the seemingly endless stream of gopher infestations reported by golfers (the pest-control guys use dynamite to solve the problem, à la Bill Murray's character in Caddyshack). As time crawls by and you wait for your cash surplus to build up so you can add a new feature to your resort, you'll find yourself praying that something exciting will happen. But something out of the ordinary almost never occurs.
If there were an option to increase the game speed, Golf Resort Tycoon would have done a much better job of holding your attention for long periods of time. However, even if this were the case, there's not much to the game beyond the thrills of golf micromanagement to keep you coming back for more. Golf Resort Tycoon can be a nice diversion and a decent way to kill time in short spurts, but it's definitely not for everyone.
