When I first saw this one pop up in the coming soon section of the eShop, I was immediately taken back to Sid Meier’s SimGolf, a game I loved nearly two decades ago. I’m sure there have been other games that tried to mix designing a golf course with playing on it since then, but this was the first time I’d seen one in a while and I had to try it. I imagine trying to get Sid Meier’s SimGolf to work these days is like pulling teeth anyway.

Under Par Golf Architect doesn’t stray too much from that SimGolf idea, but it does try to have its own fun with it at least.

In Under Par Golf Architect you’ll lay out your course, build up the fairways and greens, and sculpt the terrain to make your own golf course. It all works rather well for the most part, but I found myself fighting with the game’s UI to get it to do what I wanted. There are many instances where you’ll back out of a menu and accidentally delete or undo everything you just did, and it’s just a bit clunky. Building a course is fun, and alongside the actual holes you’ll lay out the nature and amenities as well to keep the punters happy. Although there doesn’t seem to be much reward for making a super in-depth course, as the players seem to like basic holes just as much as the more complex ones.

Keeping everyone happy is a little harder than you might expect, and it’s not immediately obvious what you’re meant to do. That’s a trend across the entire game. From the main menu you’re just thrown into it. There is a tutorial, but it’s very basic and feels like it assumes you already know what to do and where to go. That happens a lot, not just with progressing through the game but also with keeping people and staff happy. If you don’t keep the staff happy, they’ll stop doing their jobs (unless you drag them to a task, which becomes annoying), and that then makes the players unhappy as well. It’s an endless loop that never seems to settle.

The money in the game is also a bit odd. I got to a point a couple of times early on where I ran out of money and had to sit and wait for it to slowly creep back into the positive just to do anything, but I had only completed two holes, so it felt like I’d broken something. After that though, the game gave me so much money that it seemed like I was cheating, and there was little challenge as I could just buy whatever I wanted. Aside from somehow getting myself into a fail state early, there’s no real way to fail in this game. 

The other part of the game is actually playing golf on your brand new course. It works for the most part, but it feels a bit like a mini-game. There’s not much meat on the bone, and there’s no real point to playing aside from seeing how your course performs.

The game on the Switch 2 also has a couple of problems. It will randomly crash. It’s not often, but it did happen to me a couple of times. The game’s UI, while you can scale it to be bigger (and it comes larger by default), still has bits that are hard to read and figure out how to interact with. I had similar complaints with Two Point Museum, so maybe it’s just a me thing.

Under Par Golf Architect is less than the sum of its parts. Each element of the game feels a little undercooked. Together it just about holds up, but the cracks aren’t hard to find. However, the game’s got a pleasant presentation. It’s just a little bit silly, and that works if you can put up with spending a bit of time in the rough.

Rating: 3/5