3D Mini Golf: Las Vegas

Here's a tip: whenever your mafia friends become boastful, ask them if they've been to Vegas lately. They hate that. The attempt by America's east coast mafia to take a piece of the west coast's furiously profitable neon gambling cash-pie was repulsed so painfully in the '70s and '80s that no capo or button-man can think of it without blushing.

Not a company to be deterred from taking a risk, Digital Chocolate is now attempting its own encroachment into Las Vegas. For insurance, it's going armed with one of the most successful weapons in its arsenal: mini golf.

If you've played one of Digital Chocolate's mini golf games before – and, since the Castles edition is embedded on millions of Sony Ericsson handsets, you very possibly have – you'll know more or less exactly what to expect. For those of you who haven't, here's the low-down.

3D Mini Golf: Las Vegas is a crazy golf sim in which you have to propel a ball up slopes, through doorways, down channels, over ravines, off walls, and generally shepherd it towards the flag in as few shots as possible.

All you need to do in order to accomplish this is determine the direction and pace of the ball, using the '4' and '6' keys to swivel the direction, and '5' to start charging the power meter, before releasing it to take your swing.

It's simple, but it's brilliant. The courses are constructed in such a way that ingenious one-shot routes to the flag always seem tantalisingly possible, even when they're not. Much of the game's longevity consists in the compulsion to keep experimenting with pace and direction to find the magical one-shot path.

There are three courses and 27 holes, plus a bonus level at the end of each course. As well as jumps and bends, the holes are populated by escalators, which go both up and down, and teleports, often guarded by doors that rhythmically open and close. And, because this is Vegas, knocking the ball through certain doors prompts a fruit machine to fill the screen and either deluge or sprinkle you with points, depending on your luck.

Equally characteristic of its Vegas setting are the lines of coins that litter every hole which, with enough skill, you can roll the ball along to accumulate points.

Some of these glittering rows lead straight from the tee, while others only begin beyond the elbow of a bent fairway, giving you the choice to roll the ball close for an easy second shot or play the risky deflection in the hope of sub-par glory. Others are arranged in an arc across a slope, demanding that you get the pace of your shot just right if you want to collect them all.

Whereas in Castles the courses are relatively straightforward, some of Vegas's holes border on the elaborate. Many contain more than one route to the flag, giving you the choice to go for either a lot of coins or a small number of strokes. Which of these options yields the most points is irrelevant, however – the real advantage of having holes laid out in this way is that each one is effectively two, increasing the game's longevity.

Visually, Vegas does a sound but predictable impression of Vegas, replete with flashing coloured lights, pulsating LEDs, patterned carpets, and slot machines, and the bass riff that struts inoffensively behind it all hits the same safe and unadventurous notes.

While the three courses don't look substantially different from each other, the four crazy golfers you can choose from are curvaceously three-dimensional and smoothly animated, and the whole game is rendered in robust polygons, which, along with the well-honed ball physics, give you a sense of intuitive control over the action.

And it's in this – the simple pleasure of taking a swing – that Vegas excels. Judging the angle of a corner correctly or pushing a ball dead weight onto the top of a slope for a carefully obtained record score is immensely satisfying, and when you decide to throw caution to the wind and whack the ball at full power, come what may, you actually wince at your own recklessness.

In the end, the best elements of Vegas are those that most closely resemble its mini golf predecessors. It's not a major advance on the previous games, but then, what do you give the casual game that has it all?