Golf Battle 3D

I'm useless at golf. It's my exuberance with the club more than anything else - put a small ball in front of me and I will go full pelt at it, posture and hand positioning be damned.

Golf Battle 3D appears to be right up my street, consisting solely of the driving section of a good walk spoiled - you don't have to worry about putting, or where your ball went when you plow it into the nearby woodland.

But while it has the basics for a fun little arcade title, the lack of depth prevents it from making the cut.

Golf Battle 3D is a cross-platform multiplayer game. That means I've been playing it on three different systems for this review (iPhone, Android, and bada).

The good news is that it plays and looks the same on all three, so no-one will feel they’ve gotten the short straw here.

It looks good, too, from the over-exaggerated caricatures of the golfer to the rolling fairways fading into the distance.

There's no hole to aim for at the end of these strips of green, however. Instead, the fairway is marked out like an American football pitch, with lines and yard numbers chalked into its surface, and the occasional water hazard and bunker peppering the sides.

You score points depending on how far you strike the ball, with bonuses applied depending on your consistency, the angle of flight, and the type of ball struck.

Winning is simply a case of hitting a points target first (in multiplayer) or running out of time (in the single-player Arcade mode).

Game's up

The actual hitting part is extremely simple, relying on a two tap method rather than any power bars or club selection - once to start the swing, and another just as the golfer is about to connect.

There's a problem with this simplicity, though. Whereas similar games such as Com2uS's Homerun Battle 3D include variables such as ball trajectory combined with swing timing, Golf Battle 3D has to rely solely on its timing window to produce a challenge.

To its credit, the most powerful shots are tricky to pull off consistently thanks to the strictness of the timing, but because there’s no variation in the golfer’s swing animation or his position relative to the ball, hitting solid shots quickly becomes too predictable and the game loses appeal quickly.

No amount of extra customisation options and unlockable equipment, of which Golf Battle 3D has many, can get around this issue.

So while there's a certain amount of entertainment to be had in your first few rounds, racing to the target score before the other player, Golf Battle 3D won’t make it to the fourth day.