Preview: Everybody's Golf 5 (PS3)

Despite lukewarm sales and a relative obscurity outside of its native Japan, SCE's Mina No Golf series, known as Everybody's Golf in Europe and Hot Shots Golf in the US, is one of the great sporting game series. Doing cute and accessible years before Nintendo's ingenious Wii Sports Golf, it arrives on PlayStation 3 in Japan by the end of the month, and could prove to be the title to put Sony's under-achieving console back into the running.

Superficially closer to Super Monkey Ball's excellent Monkey Golf than the latest Tiger Woods release, underneath the charming anime-style visuals lies a heart of pure golfing obsession. Despite ensuing real clubs, courses and for the most part golfers in the name of artistic license, club and character choice affect a healthy array of stats for your perusal, which even in the title's native Japanese are completely clear, an impressive balance of depth and accessibility that extends into the game proper. Simple hit-and-hope gameplay isn't punished, yet those who wish to tweak shot angle, swap clubs around, and explore the lay of the land in detail can do so with a few intuitive button-presses and reap the rewards.

Play is satisfying and relaxed, even when knocking a ball around without other competitors, with feedback from your caddy and the impressively emotive crowd providing enough company to make solo practise a joy rather than chore. The quietly civilised but still compelling nature bodes well for multiplayer, with 8-player tournaments online promising a more calming alternative to Resistance's Church of England-baiting death matches and Motorstorm's incessant pile-ups. Still, details like voice-comms and international play have not yet been announced, and without knowing if the online front-end will be as user-friendly as the rest of the experience, its hard to gauge how well the experience will pan out.

Boasting the kind of nuanced courses and accessible play that would make a licensed PGA title blush, it's still surprising to note the absence of a Tiger Woods-style analogue-stick swing, or even a hashed-together Sixaxis motion control option. Given the two remaining swing control systems, variants on the old-fashioned three-press system first seen in the days of the Mega Drive, are debatably more reliable, it's an absence many could well live with. More vital features, such as pass-the-pad multiplayer and offline tournament play, are reassuringly present and correct.

Indeed, the only thing currently lacking from Everybody's Golf 5 is a sign that the jump to next-gen hardware means much beyond a quick if impressive change of scenery. Current characters and environments sit pleasantly between realism and and comic-book caricature (with the exception of Japanese golf legend Shigeki Maruyama, whose famous on-course smile looks vaguely unsettling here), but without niceties such as downloadable course packs or similar features that are now expected of current-gen software there could be little point for series fans to dive in.

It remains to be seen how big a draw this will be to early PS3 adopters, but given the series' strong sales history in its native Japan and the massively increased appeal of accessible, less "hardcore" titles there, this could be a gaming rarity- a huge-selling PS3 title in Nintendo's Summer of Wii. And with it not likely due on Western shores until this winter, it may also be one of the first must-import PS3 titles. Expect a full review and updates on Everybody's Golf's Western release here on Gamestyle next month.

Words by Colin Whiteside