The Story

Flick Golf! is the kind of Android app which you’ll pick up for five minutes and end up playing for half an hour. It’s so infuriatingly addictive, we’re surprised we ever got round to doing this review. As smartphone time wasters go, this will rob you of your life and us of our career if we don’t get back to work soon.

The Experience

Flick Golf! is an incredibly simple app to ensnare yourself in. Your aim is to drive a golf ball as close to the hole as possible by swiping the touchscreen with your finger. Once the ball is in the air you can add spin to it by swiping even more furiously in the direction you want the ball to move. It’s a simple control system that’s devilishly accurate and will quickly suck you into committing some serious playtime to what is a fairly basic app.

A great physics engines which reflects different weather conditions and some pretty 3D environments do well to make this sports game a joy to play but what really keeps us coming back to Flick Golf! is its simplicity. How hard can it be to pot a hole in one? Very hard indeed and you’ll need to score a fair few of them to complete the app’s six stages which range in difficulty from Beginner to Elite.

It’s Elite which will prove to be the real thorn in your side since you should be able to run through pretty much every level preceding it with relative ease. To unlock this beast you have to return to the preceding stages and gain a gold rating which is no mean feat and, in all honesty, has sucked a whole lot of time out of our afternoon. For a game that seemed all too easy at first, we quickly realised where the replay value was about to come from and got dutifully got obsessed.

If there’s one thing that’s irritating about Flick Golf! it’s the points system which is used to rank players. Hit a perfectly judged shot off the tee and you’ll be scantly rewarded for landing in the 500 points zone. Hit an awful shot and correct it with a heap load of spin to land in the 500 points zone and you’ll get an extra bonus for desperately engineering the change in direction. This is a minor qualm, given how unlikely it is you’ll be hitting a golden shot most of the time.

Flick Golf! may seem deceptively slight at first but we cannot underline just how freakishly compelling it is once you delve in. There are few better ways to spend 69p on the Android Market.

The Bottom Line

Flick Golf! is a freakishly compelling sports app going for a steal on the Android Market.
Additional Info
Version reviewed 1.0
Requires Android 2.1 or higher

Download Flick Golf! app from Android Market

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