Fore Score is a multiplayer minigolf game where you and your fellow players build out the hole by placing extra obstacles and items onto it. If you’ve ever played Ultimate Chicken Horse, the concept will seem pretty familiar. You start with a simple and plain course. After each round you and your friends are given a selection of objects to choose from, and then you place them to make the course harder.
I like a lot about Fore Score in theory, but in practice I have quite a few problems with it. There’s no single thing it does wrong, but none of its mechanics feel super satisfying. I also have problems with the game’s other systems.
Let’s start with the simplest one: the minigolf. Fore Score uses a 2.5d view for most of the golf, and you can’t apply any direct level of lift to the ball when you hit it. However, many obstacles are 3D, or launch the ball into the air. This makes it a sort of awkward hybrid of the two perspectives. The camera is also permanently locked, which again, makes judging certain shots very hard.
Why is the camera permanently locked? Well, it might be because the game doesn’t offer actual networked multiplayer. Instead, everything is a form of couch co-op. The game does support Steam Remote Play, which I have mixed feelings on. On the one hand, it means only person has to own the game. On the other hand, if you aren’t the host, you better hope your connection to the host is stable, or you might miss the critical shot. Because of that limitation, it makes sense that the game wouldn’t want to let every player randomly rotate the camera for everyone whenever they want. If nothing else it would make obstacle placement a confusing mess.
The only good way to describe the obstacles is ‘mediocre.’ There are several obstacles that are just reskins of each other, and boring reskins at that. Of the remaining ones, there just aren’t that many. There are several that will kill your ball and force a respawn with hitboxes that probably aren’t wrong, but are difficult to judge because of the 2.5d view.
Fore Score isn’t unfun, it’s just not as good a golf game as Golf With Your Friends, or as much of a route-builder as Ultimate Chicken Horse. If a game is going to stick with my friend group, it needs to either offer something unique, or be better than other stuff we already play. And Fore Score doesn’t succeed at that.
With that said, there have been some quality of life patches, so perhaps it will get better. If you’re still interested, you can find it here on Steam, and an early alpha here on itch.io.