Golf fans will have a new option this year: The Golf Club, a simulation golf game from Lunenberg, Canada-based HB Studios that is coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC this spring, the company announced today.
With The Golf Club, HB is aiming to deliver a realistic golf experience that is also accessible to newcomers with "minimal to zero loading times," according to a post on the game's official website. HB also wants to provide players with a game that is eminently social and customizable. To that end, The Golf Club includes a full course creator with procedurally generated courses that players can then tinker with; they also have the ability to build a course from scratch and alter elements like holes, rivers and trees. You can see a demo of an early version of the course creator below.
Users can also put together their own tournaments and tours, and then share their creations with the world. For players who don't want to bother with creating courses, The Golf Club will ship with a number of courses designed by HB Studios, although it doesn't appear that licensed versions of real-life courses will be included. Users will be able to play the created courses that others have uploaded, and because The Golf Club saves every round you play in the cloud, players can compete with friends who are offline by playing against "ghost" balls.
HB Studios, which was founded in 2000, is known for developing versions of EA Sports games on lower-priority platforms, such as Madden NFL 13 on PlayStation Vita and Wii and Madden NFL 12 on PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and Wii. The company has also made its own games for other publishers, such as NBA Baller Beats with Majesco Entertainment and MLB Home Run Derby with Major League Baseball Advanced Media.
The announcement of The Golf Club is welcome news to fans of video game golf, since until now, there was no new golf game scheduled to come out this spring. Electronic Arts, publisher of the long-running Tiger Woods PGA Tour series, announced last October that it was dropping Woods' name from the franchise. The company also provided a glimpse of developer EA Tiburon's golf title for Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but a report from last April indicated that EA wasn't planning to release a new golf game until 2015.
More information about The Golf Club is available on its website. You can check out a gameplay trailer and 20 screenshots above.
