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Another day, another tycoon game. This time it’s Golf Resort Tycoon II, which gives you the chance to design, build, and run your very own golf resort. Like most other tycoon games, however, GRT II suffers from a case of getsboringquick-itis.
You have 13 challenges to overcome, ranging from building a certain number of holes and attracting a pre-determined number of golfers to earning a set amount of money. To be successful you must set prices that’ll turn a nice profit, and keep your course in trim shape by hiring groundskeepers and gopher exterminators. Tickets
Regrettably, GRT II lacks any real depth, and the gameplay will soon have you napping. You can’t take out loans, and since it takes forever to make money (even on the highest speed setting), nearly every game involves an hourlong lull during which you have to let the game run and run so you can generate cash.
As in Sid Meier’s SimGolf, you can play golf on your courses, but the poor physics and ball control make it a monumental waste of time. The golfing mode is a zoomed-in view of the course, and you play from a third-person perspective. The graphics, which are decent enough from the overhead isometric view, just don’t work very well from this angle.
As is traditional for low-end tycoon games, you have a host of other problems to overcome to get at the slight nuggets of joy. The workers’ AI is laughable (they all flock to the same hole unless you micromanage them), the collision detection in the golfing mode stinks, and the course-editing tools are extremely superficial.
With the excellent SimGolf on the market, there’s no reason to buy GRT II unless you absolutely must have a golf tycoon game and you have only $20 to spend.