Ok, played a bunch today. Some thoughts:
-2nd Course Alpine Valley is fun. The height differences as usual add more strategy into shot planning.
-Played the first DLC course, it's ok, a plain easy course. But then I saw the 2nd DLC course was also a 1-difficulty plain easy course? Seems kind of pointless. I'd buy a $6 DLC course if it had good challenges and looked neat. Hopefully the remaining DLC courses will be more difficult and interesting.
-Submitted my daily scores and it's always interesting seeing the player count. Course 1/2 has like 30k players submitting a daily score. The DLC course #1 that was pre-order DLC has like 1.5k submitting a score.
-Ok I got challenged by the 50 birdies swim vs guy. The 15 seconds to take a shot or -1 penalty is BRUTAL, some of these modifiers really change up the gameplay (which is cool and I appreciate the replayabilty each course has because of them). We were neck and neck going +1/-1 back and forth with a bunch of ties. Got to the final hole tied and he hits it in the water on a par 3, saved my ass. Nothing worse than halfway through a 15-30 min set you miss your timing with a turtle or the wind is even stronger than you thought and the ball goes crazy and fucks up your whole game. At least in the 9H/18H against the CPU you can usually get far enough ahead to cover any mistakes on a hole. Been getting a lot of -7 to -11s on 9H and the CPU ends up with like -3 or -4 at best giving some leeway in rank 3.
-Golf cart is kinda fun, I ain't gonna hate on this
Even with the weird ass leveling and apparently end game grinding and the DLC courses so far being boring, game is still fun as hell. Really enjoy running the holes and fighting the Vs opponents, now with the added leaderboard/rivals dailies. If they just add friendlist rival leaderboards for your daily scores it'd be great. The daily stuff is kinda evil because now it's a goddamn MMO and makes you want to run each 9H course once a day and submit for the bonus items ><