We Love Golf is a return to simple, easy to pick and play golfing from Camelot, the original developer of Minna No Golf and the Mario Golf series.
The game should be instantly familiar to anyone who has played these games before: Pick a character, select a course, and get your golf on by accurately hitting the right power and accuracy points on the sliding bar at the bottom of the screen. Only this time, you're using the Wiimote to do this. Basically, you bring the Wiimote upwards, like you would swing a real club, matching up the on-screen golf club as accurately to the best spot on the right side of the bar, but instead of quickly swinging down, you then watch this selected area slide down the bar towards the left accuracy point and flick the controller gently to get the closest possible match. This works flawlessly, and while the game lacks caddies, instead you have a talking Wiimote icon on screen that speaks to you, telling you when to make the shot, how accurate you are, and cheering you on as you play. I'm as much a novice in golf games as you can get, but I found myself making amazingly accurate shots and scoring birdies in no time. The game starts off almost too easy, but I'm certain it will get harder the more that gets opened up.
You start with two default characters and one course, and can compete against CPU opponents in match play and go through the tournament mode to unlock more. There are at least eight characters total in the game; not sure about the number of courses yet. There's also several types of mini games available, plus a training mode. And in multiplayer, you can even use your Miis as your player characters. Your Miis will also appear in the tournament mode, giving you a hand when you win a trophy; the game is basically just using the Mii heads with the default game character body types.
The bonus Capcom characters appear to be in the game in the form of alternate outfits for the WLG cast. There are character skins like Ryu and Chun-Li from Street Fighter, Pearl from Phoenix Wright, Jill Valentine from Resident Evil, and Arthur from Ghouls N Ghosts. If you check out promotional movie #2 on the WLG site, you can see some of the Capcom characters.
http://www.capcom.co.jp/golf/movie/index.html There were also some interesting names on the tournament leaderboards, too, like "Leon S. Kennedy, Albert Wesker, Dante, Virgil, and Trish." I wonder if all these Capcom characters are in the game, or if this is just an easter egg? Each game character does have four bonus outfits to unlock, and I'm assuming they're all for the Capcom skins.
Compared with Tecmo's recently-released Swing Golf Pangya! 2, We Love Golf has a more colorful look, a smoother frame rate (there is no slowdown), and an overall clearer, cleaner image. But Pangya's more physical approach to using the Wiimote feels closer to gripping a golf club than We Love Golf's more simpler, easier style. Right now, I'd say I definitely prefer We Love Golf over Pangya! 2. Actually, I pretty much prefer it to any golf game out right now.
