We love golf, do we? To be completely frank my love of golf kind of dipped around the age of 16 when I realised that practically every drive I was ever going to hit at my local driving range was going to slice at elegant right angles and land in the chain fencing preventing folks on the real course suffering a fractured skull from the likes of me, and hence it was only the virtual form of the sport that I ever really got on with. Saying that I love the sport would thus be something of an overstatement, although a title like We Mildly Enjoy Some Aspects of Golf wouldn’t have sold virtual stick and ball veterans Camelot’s latest game quite so well, would it?

This, of course, is a Wii game, and as part of this you’re no doubt wondering how well they’ve gone and sorted the control system out. Previous ‘proper’ attempts at the sport – i.e. the Tiger Woods games – have been rather hit-and-miss with their swing mechanics and as a result haven’t even managed to usurp the still-rather-dodgy representation of the sport that Wii Sports’ Golf gave us, and Camelot’s effort proves equally curious despite managing to work pretty well.

The general gist of the system is that you hold a button and raise the Wii-mote as you would a golf club before pausing to line up an icon at the top of your swing bar with a trailing ghost icon. Having done this, you then swing it back down at an appropriate time to take your shot, with penalties on accuracy and power if you overshoot the power or backswing too late or early. It’s a system that really benefits being used in the standing position, annoyingly, and those wanting a more traditional three-click system are going to be left out in the cold, as there isn’t the option to swap to one. Hum.

On a basic level this system works pretty well and is a better option than trying to get some kind of full motion-sensitive swing system going with a controller that can’t cope too well, but it is hampered by a pretty cluttered selection of buttons and frustratingly vague way of adding draw or fade by twisting the Wii-mote’s face left or right as you swing. Moving your viewpoint around to check out the hole you’re on, changing the line of your shot and adding spin to whatever shot you’ve just done are all mapped to the face buttons, and even with practice you’ll still find yourself getting brain jams trying to suss out exactly what you’re doing at times. It works, yes, but it’s not anywhere as intuitive as you would have liked it to be.

Another major issue that follows directly on from the above is that the game makes the whole golf part of the show far too easy by giving you exact distance markers and ball trails, thus taking a huge part of the sport – i.e. the educated guesswork – out of the equation. Despite only just getting to grips with the control system I managed to finish my first full round of the first course with sixteen birdies, one eagle and a par and a full 32 shots clear of second place, whilst moving on to the next course had almost identical results. It’s all a bit like having a driving game that forces you to have automatic braking or a football game that tells you the ideal moment to have a shot, and as a result proceedings are a fair bit easier and not half as fulfilling.

This is undoubtedly a shame, as apart from this the game’s actually really rather pleasant to spend a good few hours with. Single player options concentrate primarily on Tournament mode, in which you compete in a succession of 18-hole rounds on different courses against a leaderboard, and the Get Character mode that pits you against a bunch of famous Capcom characters such as Chun Li and Apollo Justice in a one-on-one battle, with victory unlocking the particular character you’ve beaten for your own private use.

These prove entertaining enough, but after a while you can’t help but want for something a bit more fleshed-out than simply moving on up a succession of increasingly challenging events. Something that worked well in, for example, the PSP Everybody’s Golf was the way in which you took a character with basic abilities and levelled him or her up through a number of tiers, gaining new equipment, attributes and clothing along the way, and the lack of something quite so involving also dampens the feeling you get for We Love Golf somewhat. Much in the way that the controls are okay but the gameplay is too easy, the single player offering is fun but lacks much depth.

There are other events to try your hand at, of course, with a couple of arcade modes to have a whack at. Whether it be trying to send your shot through floating rings or attempting to land your drive as close to the pin as possible it provides a decent distraction, and when played in multiplayer can be really very entertaining. This is made all the better by Camelot once again providing competing players with their own Wii-mote – although controller sharing is an option, thankfully – to tap a number of buttons to spread cheery insults across the screen and out of their Wii-mote speaker, adding a good slice of comedy value to proceedings.

Should you find yourself short of offline chums, us Euro folks have the added bonus of an online mode to get stuck into, although it’s somewhat cut down from the single player options as it only allows you to play 9-hole rounds of matchplay golf. That being said, it’s still entertaining and convenient (despite the Wii’s Friends Codes system still being an utter pain in the arse), and in my limited experience also really quite smooth, with lag nowhere to be seen.

The rest of We Love Golf – the way it looks, sounds and presents itself – is typically Camelot, with super-deformed cartoon characters with maniacal grins, colourful courses and annoyingly happy ditties buzzing along as you work through. The problem is, as mentioned, it’s never really the kind of thing you find yourself able to get your teeth into, with the game being rather too easy for its own good and not offering any sort of progressive career mode. You feel as though it’s somewhat of a 200-yard dollop onto the middle of the fairway rather than a 300-yard drive for the green, and as a result of playing it reasonably safe it’s fallen a fair whack short of what it could have been. But for the want of a few more features and less nannying the Wii could have had its very own Mario Golf, but as it stands Camelot’s latest is more par than birdie.