After the success of Rocket League, I’m surprised there’s not been more of a glut of car-based sports. Rocket League itself included modes based on ice hockey and basketball, but the objectives there are pretty much the same – get the object into the goal. It’s taken quite some time for a completely different sport to arrive, and Turbo Golf Racing seeks to do what its name describes – inject a golf game with turbos and racing. The cars look similar in some way to the Rocket League roster, though with large bumpers on the front. The relative size of car and ball is familiar. The speeds you drive, with the possibility of jumping and boosting, are very close, but not exactly the same. You’d be forgiven for assuming this was by Psyonix.

But the driving model isn’t exactly the same, and after having played the PS4 version of Rocket League for over 400 hours, and the Xbox and Switch versions for significant time on top, the differences are just enough to cause me issues. There’s no double jump, for a start, and I have tried numerous times to jump sideways into a ball to nudge it into the hole only to find myself boosting forwards and away from where I need to be. There’s also a different way to get height on the ball when driving – in TGR you need to hold up on the analogue stick to hit the ball upwards, whereas in RL you’d aim your car nose down to get the same effect.

That’s not to say it’s uncontrollable – it’s just a little different. I’ve spent most of my time in the race mode, where you try to get your ball into the hole as quickly as possible, with seven others doing the same. Ordinarily you cannot interact with their balls (or, indeed, them) but there are powerups you can collect such as missiles and ice beams which cause them to lose control. Otherwise it’s almost like a single-player game, with ghosts flying around you. The golf mode, where you have to get the ball into the hole with as few touches as possible, is a completely different pace.

It’s a fun game. Unfortunately it’s full of microtransactions and a focus on cosmetics, learning from the very worst practices of Epic – another way in which it’s like Rocket League. I’ll be content with my purple basic car for now, than you very much; it’s not as if I see anything other than the back of it most of the time.

This has sat on my Xbox for ages, after I saw Matt playing it once on a stream, and I have finally got around to playing it. It takes cues from FTL, I think, but is structured around shorter missions and a roguelike framework where you can build up your crew and plane capabilities but at any point can lose them and restart. You control the seven members of your plane crew: setting navigation points; tagging enemies for the gunners to shoot at; getting the engineer to run around fixing parts of the plane which have malfunctioned or been shot to pieces; deploying bombs or taking recon photos.

It’s a constant juggle to make sure that the guns have ammo, there’s someone available to fire forwards while the bombardier is crawling into his space and opening the doors, and seven hundred other things are ongoing. The first few missions are relatively easy – drop some supplies to a downed Spitfire pilot with a few enemies buzzing around, or bomb some installations near the coast, all of which can be done at low level – but I’ve now progressed to the point where the installations I am trying to attack are surrounded by flak artillery, so I have to fly at a higher level, meaning my crew need thermal wear and oxygen supplies … oh, and I have to peer through clouds to see the bombing targets. In addition, missions are interrupted by other emergencies – needing to shoot down a V2 rocket, a battle with a German ace – meaning that it’s increasingly difficult to get home safe.

It’s the difficulty and excitement that has kept my interest up. Completing missions and getting home safely is difficult, and there have been multiple time when my plane has limped home on two engines, with my engineer frantically putting out fires and my radio operator administering first aid to a gunner who is lying on the floor bleeding. I am slightly cheating at the game in that every time it looks as if I’m going to crash and burn, I’m quitting the game and restarting missions, rather than just accepting defeat and starting afresh with a new crew – but I’ve made peace with that, in that it means I’m actually enjoying it rather than being afraid to actually take off. The financial constraints feel artificial anyway – I’m pretty sure that in WWII the bomber crews weren’t charged to upgrade their engines based on them earning money in previous missions.

This has sat on my Xbox for ages, after I saw Matt playing it once on a stream, and I have finally got around to playing it. It takes cues from FTL, I think, but is structured around shorter missions and a roguelike framework where you can build up your crew and plane capabilities but at any point can lose them and restart. You control the seven members of your plane crew: setting navigation points; tagging enemies for the gunners to shoot at; getting the engineer to run around fixing parts of the plane which have malfunctioned or been shot to pieces; deploying bombs or taking recon photos.

It’s a constant juggle to make sure that the guns have ammo, there’s someone available to fire forwards while the bombardier is crawling into his space and opening the doors, and seven hundred other things are ongoing. The first few missions are relatively easy – drop some supplies to a downed Spitfire pilot with a few enemies buzzing around, or bomb some installations near the coast, all of which can be done at low level – but I’ve now progressed to the point where the installations I am trying to attack are surrounded by flak artillery, so I have to fly at a higher level, meaning my crew need thermal wear and oxygen supplies … oh, and I have to peer through clouds to see the bombing targets. In addition, missions are interrupted by other emergencies – needing to shoot down a V2 rocket, a battle with a German ace – meaning that it’s increasingly difficult to get home safe.

It’s the difficulty and excitement that has kept my interest up. Completing missions and getting home safely is difficult, and there have been multiple time when my plane has limped home on two engines, with my engineer frantically putting out fires and my radio operator administering first aid to a gunner who is lying on the floor bleeding. I am slightly cheating at the game in that every time it looks as if I’m going to crash and burn, I’m quitting the game and restarting missions, rather than just accepting defeat and starting afresh with a new crew – but I’ve made peace with that, in that it means I’m actually enjoying it rather than being afraid to actually take off. The financial constraints feel artificial anyway – I’m pretty sure that in WWII the bomber crews weren’t charged to upgrade their engines based on them earning money in previous missions.