Real Golf Impressions

If you can’t beat ‘em, copy the heck out of ‘em – This seems to be Gameloft’s philosophy when it comes to Real Golf, its new mobile golf sim. Tiger Woods already has the genre more or less in the bag, so Gameloft went out and made its own version, albeit with a few twists of its own.

You can’t play as Tiger in this one, but you do have access to three 18-hole courses, all of which are beautifully rendered in verdant tones. Club selection is apparently automatic, which cuts down on the confusion for a lot of first-time duffers. Although Real Golf has its own take on the obligatory swing meter (it’s in rainbow colors here), it borrows liberally from Tiger’s overhead map system to show the results of each shot. As a result, your swing is rendered from the usual third-person viewpoint, in addition to the initial trajectory of your ball. However, then the game switches to an overhead layout for planning purposes. Putting, on the other hand, is handled a little differently. Here, you can access a 3D overlay to figure out which way the green is breaking.

Real Golf is tentatively scheduled for a Q3 2004 release.