Now getting away from Fish Hooks, I decided to take a look at another Gravity Falls game that recently came out on DisneyXD’s game section. For those who’ve read my previous Gravity Falls related reviews you know that I have a deep love for the series of Gravity Falls with its intelligent writing, interesting setting and great characters. Last time Dipper and Mabel were facing Rumble in a side scrolling beat ’em up and now they face their most deadliest foe; really standardly, lazy golf playing. The true horror can’t even be described but I’m gonna try.

The context of the game is simple enough, Dipper and Mabel are bored one day and decide to set up their room into a golf course. Firstly the designs of all the stages are very detailed and diverse, emulating the show so well that it will have fans squealing with glee. The mechanics are simple enough as well you get two choices in how you want to control the game. The first is using your mouse to aim and shoot your glass eyeball (this game’s version of golfballs) by holding the mouse and moving it back and forth to determine how hard you want to hit it.

Going through the first game using this method I realized very quickly it’s a very problematic control scheme. Whenever your ball ends up close to any wall. What happens is as soon as you leave the region on the screen where the game is playing on, even if your power level is at nothing, that’s as far as the power gauge will go and as soon as you let go you will hit it with pathetic strength. The second method, and by far the more controllable one, is using the arrow keys to control the direction and strength of it and clicking the space bar to finally shoot it. If anyone ever decides to play the game I’d suggest to use the arrow keys, so that they can have more control over how hard and the direction you hit the eyeball.

Now the nine levels in this game are what best can be described as gimmick levels. One level you have a helmet where you have to time it to shoot in the right direction, another it has the shrinking and growing crystals from the episode Little Dipper and another with some stuffed Panda-Ducks. All these add to using diverse strategies for each level but they’re just kinda there. Not really explored, and all the levels are formatted just as a tutorial level. This tutorial feeling is thanks to what I believe to be plain uninventive laziness.

The controls, and the backgrounds are great I can’t deny, that but with only nine levels the game has no chance to stretch its legs to real give a fun challenge to anything and instead opts to just tutorialize everything. I did three playthroughs of the game in succession, varying in using different paths and such to get it in the coffee can at the end and overall I only spent a half an hour on it. And I wasn’t even trying to speed run it. In fact, the game has built in a 5 stroke limit that makes the game go even faster if you suck too hard at a level.

The game just doesn’t even attempt to really catch your attention and it just felt mechanical playing through especially with the “Tips” at the beginning of each level telling you the most head smackingly obvious “Tips” possible. Look, this game is for kids in mind but half of these level lay outs already give the player enough info to make these gameplay decisions themselves, it doesn’t need the game designer to lead the player by the nose with these “Tips” that of course any player with a brain cell would have figured out in 5 seconds.

At the end of the day, Attic Stuff Golf works but gives off an air of just half hearted intent and laziness. A game that was created to fill space rather than entertain anyone. They couldn’t even be bothered to animate the eyeball rotating as it was moving. It just looks like Dipper and Mabel are hitting a hockey puck along the course rather then a spherical ball. It’s not god awful but the designers really needed to push themselves more while designing these sort of games so that it could be more then just a boring, mechanical experience.

SCORE: 4 OUT OF 10