As far as new mobile releases go, Neko Golf Anime Golf might be one of my favourites of the year. While it won’t touch the heights of Into the Breach, it’s a genuinely fun free-to-play game.
As someone who couldn’t give two dumps about actual golf, the simple-and-fun gameplay of Neko Golf has utterly consumed me over the past week. However, the new mobile game suffers from one of the most infuriating gacha systems I’ve ever used.
Is Neko Golf any good?
Firstly, let’s start with the positives. At its core, Neko Golf is a strong contender for best casual game of the year. As a free-to-play game, it’s one of the easiest to pick up and play, and it’s simple-but-charming anime aesthetic works brilliantly on high-res, OLED phone displays.
Every map is detailed enough, but it’s the colours and textures that make it a joy to look at. Furthermore, beautifully expressive animations and effects when getting great or perfect hits truly digs into the dopamine receptors in your brain.
It’s a game that feels good to play. There’s just enough thinking that you can never fully turn off, but not enough to have you stressing out. There’s also a large amount of maps to play on with over 50 holes to try and meet par on!
Additionally, Neko Golf is designed entirely around multiplayer, and its 1 million players are lovely. Using emoticons — although voice chat is available — everyone cheers each other on, even if mistakes are made! It’s a nice community to engage in for once.
A bad gacha
Unfortunately, Neko Golf falls apart when it comes to its monetisation, and I’m saying this as someone who has spent money on the game. (Yes, I bought the battle pass, but only because I’ve played close to 15 hours of the game already.)
There are multiple clubs to unlock and level up, most of which you’ll be fine just playing the game to get. Those don’t really matter all that much, despite being pay-to-win if you spend obscene amounts. Instead, it’s the characters you unlock that drive me crazy.
In the main gacha, you can unlock four additional characters outside of the main guy. However, in order to unlock them, you must first unlock costume attachments for those characters in the same gacha.
Essentially, you’re expected to do as many gacha pulls as possible to get doubles of costume pieces. Every costume piece increases a character‘s star ranking; once that ranking reaches 100, you get to use them.
What this means is that there’s a lot of grinding, or spending, to unlock any character. As someone who has spent money, not for the gacha but I’ve still spent, and played many hours since launch, I’ve still not unlocked a single character.
Of course, there are ways of getting characters quicker. There is a tiny 2% chance that your gacha pull will just unlock a character, leading many to simply reroll the initial gacha (by restarting the entire game) to unlock one that they want.
As it stands, Neko Golf’s gacha is infuriating, and it’s an incredibly disheartening part of an otherwise fantastic free-to-play game. I won’t be spending any more on this title; I’ve supported the developers for the fun I’ve had. However, for those who are genuinely unable to stop themselves from spending on gachas, I’d urge you to heavily avoid this… it will not be good for you.
