LET’S PLAY: Mini Golf Resort

For a map named after mini golf, this resort is ironically massive. There’s a hotel, juice bars, tons of other relaxation spots… you could easily enjoy a pleasant vacation here without playing any golf at all.

But that’s a little early to give up, even for us, so we track down our first hole. It’s a par two you say? Easy! ‘Par’ is basically the bare minimum number of attempts it should take you to get your ball into the hole at the end. So if this hole is merely a par two, this should take no time at all!

See that little red bar on the bottom of the screen? The one just above the ‘ball’? (nice job on making a ball in a game where everything is a block btw). That’s essentially your power meter. When you press ‘swing’, that meter goes all the way up to a hundred and then crashing back down to zero. Timing when you let go will decide how powerfully you whack the ball. Do you wallop it so hard it ends up in outer space, or gently tap it down the course? Decisions decisions…

Giving it a mighty smack is mighty tempting, but not always wise. Sure, you’ll send it hurtling towards the flag where the all-important hole is. But you’ll also be risking hitting all sorts of nasty nonsense along the way. You wanna keep the ball on the nice light green squares if you can, because the ball will happily roll along those. The darker green ones are the ‘rough’ which is just as bad as it sounds. Those dark green jerks will slow down your ball. Boo!

As you can see from the appalling amount of attempts it took us to finish the hole above, Mini Golf Resort takes a fair bit of practice. And that’s fine! You can retry or start over on a hole whenever you like. That’s helpful for calming us down and stopping us from attacking a tree with our club after 25 shots…

Actually, if you do want to hit something, just golf at night. Because this map defaults to Survival mode, and security is pretty lax at this resort (hey, explains how we got in). We got so distracted trying to improve our scores that we didn’t even notice that night had fallen. Not until these bozos tried to join our game anyway:

Movies have lied to us - a golf club is a rubbish weapon. We decide to hide and whimper in the bathroom until sunrise instead. Cowardice? Um, no. In golf this is called ‘ingenious strategy’. Look it up! Oh, wait - if you do that, you’ll find out we’re lying. Er, don’t look it up.

After a long night of weeping with terro… er, weeping with courage, a nice relaxing spot of golf sounded like the perfect way to calm our nerves. But we were getting tired of exploring on foot. Luckily, this resort thought of that. There are golf buggies everywhere!

How many of our fellow golfers did we run over? Zero! Well, zero plus another number, but never mind that now. These buggies are a great way to explore the resort and discover all the holes. They’re even better for speeding away before someone notices yet another embarrassing score of yours. Hypothetically.

The buggies aren’t even the only vehicle on the resort. We thought the helicopter was just a visual detail to make the resort look larger in scale. Imagine our delight when we discovered you could hop in and fly it!

This is perfect for tracking down the last few holes you might have missed! Sadly there’s no option to drop the golf ball from the helicopter and cheat, but we would never do such a thing anyway, of course.

Flying the helicopter involved plenty of trial and error, and successfully landing the thing took a lot of error and error. If you’d like a turn, go right ahead. We’ve ‘parked’ it on the hotel roof somehow. Help yourself.

We expected a nice round of golf but were pleasantly surprised just how detailed and vast the resort is. You could easily have fun role-playing as a manager here. Please don’t kick us out.

Plus the fact it’s all still Minecraft adds a fun streak of chaos to stuffy old golf. We’d love to know how a pro golfer would handle a Minecraft sheep suddenly blocking their line of sight on the green. Bet they’d throw a slightly more dignified tantrum than we did.

Get some friends together, ban any outside weapons so no one can defend themselves with anything but their clubs, then have a game of night golf where deadly mobs are lurking around every corner! Let’s see how boring your friend Alan thinks golf is when he has to try and make a Par Three without looking at the Enderman who’s just spawned next to the flag…

You can try Mini Golf Resort by Cracked Cube yourself by searching for it in Minecraft Marketplace or clicking this lovely line of green text. Now if you’ll excuse us, we think we just saw a skeleton archer, so we’re going back to whimpering in the bathroom for a few more hours. Bye!