HB Studios have announced today that their golf simulation video game is available as of today on the PlayStation 4 throughout all of the PAL regions. Ready your clubs and put on your tweed, it’s time to get golfing. You can find this little golfing gem right now on the PlayStation Store.

The game is available already across the rest of the world on Steam and via the Xbox One’s Xbox Live marketplace. Anthony Kyne, a Producer at HB Studios said , “We’re excited to be able to roll out the PS4 version in Europe for The Golf Club. The reaction to the game has been fantastic so far and a real credit to the team who has worked hard to deliver the ultimate golf experience on next gen console.”

The price is set at £28.99/€34.99 and the game also features a part course designer as well as a simulation golf title. This gives players the ability to create their own courses and challenge their friends. You could even replicate your local course and clock in some time from home when the weather is particularly foul.

The Golf Club is now globally available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Steam. Go have fun.

No matter whether you’re an accomplished golfer or a newbie who doesn’t know your bogies from your eagles, HB Studios’ The Golf Club is certainly an enjoyable – and refreshing – example of the sport on the small screen.

"The lack of power gauges or swing-based timers make it particularly tricky to pull off a masterstroke, as it’s all left to your judgement as to how hard you hit a ball. But once you find that sweet spot, it all proves thoroughly entertaining."

Billed as a golf simulation, The Golf Club takes an altogether stance from the typical arcade games that dominate consoles. There’s no handholding, and little by way of instruction unless you visit the game’s website. There aren’t any power ups here, nor celebratory dances, character progression or Kinect gimmicks. This is a game that focusses on realism and skill. And there are plenty of stats and league tables to keep your eye on too – so you can see how you’re improving and compare with your rivals.

The lack of power gauges or swing-based timers make it particularly tricky to pull off a masterstroke, as it’s all left to your judgement as to how hard you hit a ball. But once you find that sweet spot, it all proves thoroughly entertaining.

There are several game modes on offer: stroke play, match play, 4-ball, as well as tours and tournaments. You can play the various game modes either alone, with friends locally or online. Onscreen, there’s a heap of information available, from the distance to the hole, club selection, scorecard, number of strokes, and so on.

Prior to each shot, a quick button press provides a bird’s eye view of the course and highlights distances, hazards and how your competitors are doing. You’re also able to tweak settings to affect the flight of the ball, adjusting its loft etc.

Once happy with your positioning, simply pulling back on the right stick and then pushing forward in a swift movement sends the ball soaring into the air. Then you just have to wait with baited breath to see if you’ve overhit the thing or struck it like a pro. Rivals’ ghost balls fly through the air as you play your shots, giving you an idea of how they have approached the hole.

"The game looks pretty good, with decent water effects, lush greens, plenty of trees and nicely animated character models. Close up, the graphics can look a little rough in places though, with some dodgy textures."

Once you’re done with the preloaded courses, you can take on the powerful Greg Norman course designer option. It’s pretty intuitive and within seconds you’re able to create an all-new layout and challenge, which offers unlimited replayability. Or you could just try your hand at the user-generated offerings that have been shared. This is a game all about community and already boasts a glut of user-generated content – but in time, there will be an unfathomable number of courses on offer to keep you busy.

Creating your very own masterpiece is as complicated or as simple as you want to make it, with everything customisable from the number of sand traps and trees to gradients, the position of the clubhouse or whether you want a smattering of decorative golf carts dotted about the place.

Among the biggest selling points is perhaps the lack of loading times between holes. On the face of it, this may not seem revolutionary but there are no jarring delays when you make your way around a course.

The game looks pretty good, with decent water effects, lush greens, plenty of trees and nicely animated character models. Close up, the graphics can look a little rough in places though, with some dodgy textures. The sound effects are minimal – in a good way – restricted to ambient sounds and your caddy commenting on your progress. Fortunately, he seems an amiable chap and isn’t too irritating, often offering good advice.

The Golf Club is good fun and well worth a play; it’s easy to get into but tricky to master. But that’s not to say this is only for the hardcore fans who know their driver from their putter – this will appeal to novices to the sport too.

This game was reviewed on Xbox One.

According to HB Studios, The Golf Club runs at 1080p on the PlayStation 4 and 720p on the Xbox One. GamingBolt asked HB Studios the reason why The Golf Club, which does not seem to be a resource intensive game, is running at that resolution on the latter?

“It’s is actually a lot more resource intensive than you’d think. The world is 2km’s square and everything within that has physics colliders attached to it, we also have a full cloud and atmospheric lighting system not just a painted sky box like most games. Think about it this way, each blade of grass needs to react as you’d expect, each branch on a tree needs to react like you’d expect when a ball hits it,” HB Studios said in a statement issued to GamingBolt.

“The other problem we have is that we don’t define the maps, like most games. The users create them! This means that they could have 90% of their 2km square as water. Water is extremely expensive to recreate, there’s a lot of maths in the getting the right amount of reflection, etc.”

So was there no scope to use the June SDK update for the Xbox One or the free GPU resource due the game not using the Kinect? Bungie’s Destiny did benefit from the SDK update which allowed them to bump the resolution of the Xbox One version to 1080p or is there more than what meets the eye?

“Unfortunately it came a little too late for us to use, we’ve taken a look at it though and hope that we’re going to be able to use the benefits in some future updates.”

Thoughts? Let us know in the comments section below. The Golf Club is now available for purchase.

HB Studios’ The Golf Club was recently revealed to be running at 720p on the Xbox One and 1080p on the PS4. GamingBolt got in touch with the developer to know more about this latest Xbox One resolution debacle.

It seems that gamers are pretty vocal these days about frame rates and resolutions. Having said that, we asked HB Studios whether the Xbox One will ever get out of this 1080p debacle and whether this is a hardware thing and can’t be resolved by software/SDK updates in the long run?

“If you look back at all console life cycles visuals always improve over time. As us developers get used to the libraries and hardware and work out new techniques we can use to squeeze every ounce of power out of the machine the graphics will improve, frame rates will improve and the experience as a whole improve.”

Do you agree with HB Studios thoughts? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Golf Club has a clear focus with online-play and this is present right from starting up the game. As it’s so heavily focused on being online, a character customization menu is present for the player to have their own identity when competing for scores and leaderboard tracking. In the game’s current state not many game modes are available.

" Right now the player is able to take part in a small number games varying from single to four player online, including a scoring-based tournament. There's also a course creator mode for players to tweak and have fun with."

They exist within the menus as an upcoming look for the final build, but are locked-off at this current point in time. Right now the player is able to take part in a small number of games varying from single to four player online, including a scoring-based tournament. There’s also a course creator mode for players to tweak and have fun with.

One thing in particular that I hope is addressed upon the game’s final release, is the lack of PC-based features and control scheme. Opening scenes present themselves through tips and tricks regarding gameplay, but only do so in catering to gamepads. There’s no button mapping nor instructions on how to play the game with a mouse and keyboard. It’s playable, but it’s also a walk in the desert scrounging for water. While the game may be best played with a gamepad M&KB support is needed. The game’s visual presence is also something that needs attention. Golf Club is a good looking game, but the optimization issues the game suffers from regarding hardware requirements and not actually matching up to what’s listed can hinder it’s enjoyability.

The game does run smooth however once you’ve got past this hurdle, but it should be noted that I had to brute-force the game with a high-end Nvidia graphics card, as well as lowering the requirements on a different lower-end laptop. Nevertheless it looks great once in play.

"Gameplay takes a strong focus to simulation and those familiar with such games. Physical stances, swing types, and yard estimations are something to be knowledgeable off."

Gameplay takes a strong focus to simulation and those familiar with such games. Physical stances, swing types, and yard estimations are something to be knowledgeable of. With that being said, golfers will most likely find more enjoyment within the game than those looking for a way into games of this nature. There’s nothing wrong with learning as you go along, and this may prove to be something of use when The Golf Club reaches it’s final release.

There’s a strong mist of curiosity as there is uncertainty, when taking part in games released through early access. As to how much Golf Club will improve and possibly add more content still remains a mystery. For the most part it’s playable, and as said previously it’s enjoyable, but this comes at a cost for lack of optimization, and a few instances of lag within menu navigation and online gameplay.

This game was previewed on the PC.

GamingBolt spoke to executive producer Peter Garcin about the game including the studio’s focus on next gen, it’s powerful course editor, the social features it will implement and how the development team is achieving such detail using the power of Unity.

"It was about innovation and a re-imagining of what a golf game could be so that we could develop an experience that was completely new for people and hopefully a fresh take on the genre."

Rashid Sayed: The Golf Club is due on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. What kind of benefits has this bought to the development of the game?

Peter Garcin: One of the big ones that we’ve been talking about a lot is zero load times. Having a lot of extra memory means that we can keep the entire course loaded at once rather than individual holes – and this means no loading between holes. The other has been computer shaders which really allowed us to push the course creation aspect much further than we would have been able to otherwise – we can do a lot of really complex calculation in almost realtime taking advantage of that aspect.

Rashid Sayed: Given that EA already has a strong pedigree with the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series, does it bother you that have you have lot of ground to cover in regards to creating the best Golf game out there?

Peter Garcin: Not at all! In fact, I think for us we don’t even necessarily see it as going toe-to-toe with those guys. We don’t have the scale to be able to do that and so for us, it was about innovation and a re-imagining of what a golf game could be so that we could develop an experience that was completely new for people and hopefully a fresh take on the genre. So for us, we see that The Golf Club is something totally new for players in this space.

Rashid Sayed: What was the inspiration to keep the game exclusive to next gen consoles and PC. There are over 150 million PS3 and Xbox 360s’ out there. Business wise, you guys should have made it cross generation, right?

Peter Garcin: Well we’ve definitely not ruled it out – we’ve never said “no” to PS3/360 – but at the same time, when we started out we knew that to really achieve what we were after and to push the boundaries we needed to be on the next-gen machines and PC. Now that the game is nearly done we can look at how we can bring the experience to a wider audience and include as many people as possible.

Feature parity and “experience parity” is really important for us, so we need to work out how we can deliver that to people on those platforms in a way that makes sense for everyone – because yeah, there are a lot of people on those platforms and we want them to have access to the game.

Rashid Sayed: Tell us a bit about the course editor? At the moment players can craft based on current available course templates. Do you plan to include a feature where players can craft courses from the scratch?

Peter Garcin: Absolutely. You can definitely start from a blank slate and edit in as much detail as you want. And I think rather than describing them as “templates” – I think I’d describe it as parameters and then the algorithm will create a course based on those parameters – so there won’t be a templated feel to the courses that are generated – each one will be unique. We worked really hard to make sure that nothing felt cookie-cutter.

Rashid Sayed: Are there any plans to bring real courses to the game and what is the golfer roster looking like for the final version?

Peter Garcin: In terms of real courses – there’s nothing really to announce there. We haven’t ruled out real-life courses, but at the moment the game is planning to ship with courses created by the dev team here only – a good kind of cross-section to demonstrate what’s possible within the editor.

For golfers – we found that in Golf, most people want to play as themselves and that because our game is mostly focused on user competition that having a roster of licensed golfers wasn’t something that was a priority for us. So at the moment – we’re not planning to have a roster of licensed pro golfers in the game.

"We did talk a lot about what level of a “career” mode we were going to have – but in the end – we shelved the idea of a traditional career mode for launch. "

Rashid Sayed: Talk us through the physics engine used in The Golf Club Game. What kind of things have you implemented which makes it unique from other golf games?

Peter Garcin: I think one of the neat effects of having the course be a complete seamless world is that wind is consistent across the course. You don’t have a situation where you’ve got conflicting wind readings going all over the place as you move from hole-to-hole – it’s got a global wind model so the wind behaves as it would in the real world and is consistent between holes. And then in terms of ball spin, rolling physics – everything that you’d expect to be there in the game is covered and behaves in a manner that is consistent with the real world.

Rashid Sayed: Are you pushing the game to be 60 fps and 1080p resolution on both the PS4 and Xbox One?

Peter Garcin: Yes – we’re targeting as high of a framerate as is sustainable – and for us, we want experience parity on all consoles, so yes 60fps is our target.

Rashid Sayed: Are you developing the PC version scalable in terms of visuals for high end rigs?

Peter Garcin: PC will have a wide array of options to customize effects and detail level depending on your rig. The PC version already runs above 60fps even at max detail on a rig that is comparable to the consoles – so those with super-high-end rigs will have a really slick experience.

Rashid Sayed: What can you tell us about the single player mode? Do you have any career or tournament modes planned?

Peter Garcin: This is one of those elements where the essence of what a single-player mode is in a largely user-generated game starts to break down. We did talk a lot about what level of a “career” mode we were going to have – but in the end – we shelved the idea of a traditional career mode for launch. We wanted to be able to do it justice and build it out in a way that makes sense for a game like this. That being said, we do have tours and tournaments in the game in the form of user-created tours and tournaments.

Without a preset array of courses or competitions – the only way tournaments or tours make sense is to have them be user-created. So users can generate their own “playlist” of courses which you can then compete in. Stats are and scorecards are all saved so there is a long-term progression in the game – but the traditional “season” cycle, attribute-building aspect is not present in the game. Another reason being that we wanted to focus on multiplayer competition and for all users to have a level-playing field attribute-wise so that you could not grind your way to the top of the leaderboards. It’s a really complex issue and one that we’ll continually developing even after launch.

Rashid Sayed: Sharing is an important feature in The Golf Club Game. How will the community know some of the best made courses out there?

Peter Garcin: At the simplest level – users can rate courses so that the best courses bubble to the top. But we’ve also been spending a lot of time building a suite of filtering tools to make it easy to find courses made by your friends, particular authors, by type, etc. So discoverability is something that we thought about right from the start. We’ve also built in the ability to feature courses so that if there is really cool content we can curate that to give it some visibility.

"For sure finding ways to parallelize tasks is the key to getting performance out of these boxes – and we were aware of that from the beginning so have built the game accordingly."

Rashid Sayed: Is sharing only limited to custom courses?

Peter Garcin: Well – everything in the game is custom courses – and everything is shareable! We wanted to make sharing as easy as possible and not put limitations on what people could or couldn’t do with the creation tools.

Rashid Sayed: The PlayStation 4 is obviously a bit more powerful specs wise, at least on paper. Are you using that extra push on the PS4 to make the game better?

Peter Garcin: For us – experience and feature parity is the goal because we want everyone to be able to have the same gameplay experience and to be able to share content so a level-playing field is really important.

Rashid Sayed: Talking about the Xbox One, have you faced any issues with working on the eSRAM? There are conflicting reports regarding eSRAM. Some developers said to us that it’s a bottleneck whereas some believe it can be advantageous if used in the right manner. What are your thoughts on this and how is the team handling Xbox One’s complex architecture?

Peter Garcin: We use Unity so a lot of that stuff is hidden away from us. Some of the differences might rear their head when it comes time for final optimization – but up to this point – no problems on any of the platforms.

I think really for both questions [above]– that the fact that we’re using Unity, and the fact that we’re not yet at that last-mile optimization stage means that we haven’t run into any problems or situations where we have to squeeze performance out of hardware.

Rashid Sayed: What are your thoughts on PS4 and Xbox One’s GPU? Have you used the GPUGPU capability of both consoles to push the visuals further?

Peter Garcin: We’ve definitely taken advantage of the GPGPU capabilities – but mostly in the realm of course creation to help drive the terrain generation and that sort of thing. We do also use it for realtime atmospheric light scattering and clouds as well which generates some of the fantastic atmosphere that you can see in the game. So it’s definitely been an advantage.

"Motion controls or platform specific features we definitely always keep on our roadmap but we would never do it just for the sake of it."

Rashid Sayed: Compared to the Xbox One, have you faced any development issues on the PS4? Is the single core speed resulting into thread management issues?

Peter Garcin: Again – at this stage, we haven’t run into issues but as we push the game through to final completion, that last-mile optimization stuff is where some of these things might become issues that we need to deal with. For sure finding ways to parallelize tasks is the key to getting performance out of these boxes – and we were aware of that from the beginning so have built the game accordingly.

Rashid Sayed: Are there any plans to include Kinect or DualShock 4’s touch pad support?

Peter Garcin: Motion controls or platform specific features we definitely always keep on our roadmap but we would never do it just for the sake of it – it has to make sense in the game and actually be good. We’ve done a lot of motion gaming here – Kinect especially – and we know what it takes for it to be good, so we want to be sure that if we do add motion controls to the game that it is really compelling.

While there have been severe criticisms facing the Xbox One, especially with regards to the eSRAM within the system, there have also been developers who report no problems with the same. HB Studios executive producer Peter Garcin is one such developer. HB Studios is developing The Golf Club for PC, PS4 and Xbox One, and is perhaps most well known for its work on EA Sports’ Madden NFL series.

When asked about how the team was handling the Xbox One’s eSRAM, especially with all the conflicting reports out there, Garcin simply stated that, “We use Unity so a lot of that stuff is hidden away from us. Some of the differences might rear their head when it comes time for final optimization – but up to this point – no problems on any of the platforms.”

For those unaware, the limited resolution of several Xbox One titles – especially compared to the PS4 – has been a subject of constant discussion and some developers blamed the former’s eSRAM. Other developers like Capybara Games deny that the eSRAM has bottlenecked the system and there is a belief that it will become a benefit for texture streaming once it’s properly utilized. What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments.

HB Studios is bring their latest sports title, The Golf Club, to next gen consoles PlayStation 4 and Xbox one, as well as PC. Based on the video, The Golf Club looks to be a visually stunning, and wholly realistic experience that is likely to be way more relaxing than the actual experience of playing golf in real life.

The graphics and gameplay aside, The Golf Club features a number of features that aim to bring the overall experience to the next level. HB Games has incorporated a course creator, in which players will be able to create their own golf courses to play on.

Not only that, but there is a social networking element involved as well–Gamers will be able to share the courses that they create with their friends who also play The Golf Club. Additionally–as no sports game seems to be leaving this out anymore–gamers will be able to play against one another via an online connection, adding a competitive element to the game.

Stay tuned to Gamingbolt for more developments on The Golf Club as they are released.