In the late 90s and early 2000’s when Sid Meier was the king of the sim genre, Firaxis games was making every type of sim imaginable. One of those games was 2002’s SimGolf. It released during the height of Tiger mania and as a 14 year old I was super excited to build my own golf course. Nearly 25 years later developer Broken Arm Games is looking to recreate that magic with Under Par Golf Architect, but the results are mixed.

Under Par Golf Architect is a management simulation game where you get to design your own golf course and run it as a business. Once a hole is designed and you’ve plopped down a Clubhouse, you can open you course and get started. The game features 12 story levels that you can progress through and work towards 3 stars on each course, as well as a sandbox mode which is typical for most games like this.

The story mode itself is where you will want to start. You open up career mode and are put into a town in a little mini cart to drive around, very similar to Moving Out and Overcooked. Within the city will be all the levels that you can build your courses on but you will need to do them in order and get enough stars to unlock access points.

Once you get into a course things are fairly straight forward. On console it took a minute to figure out the exact controls and how everything works since the game doesn’t really have much of a tutorial, but after 10 minutes or so I had things figured out.

I Need To Be More Creative

Once you have the controls figured out its time to get building. In order for your course to officially open you need 1 hole and a Clubhouse, but of course golfers want much more than that. A golf course indeed needs many things to function and Broken Arms has done a great job of giving you all the tools you need to make a living, breathing golf resort.

From multiple food options, restrooms and many things to help your golfers get better like a driving range or mini putt, you have a good variety of buildings at your disposal. As you progress in the story mode you will also unlock more options like a spa or tennis court, turning your golf course into a legit club where people can come to do a variety of things. You can also upgrade each of the buildings from level 1 to level 3 to boost the stats of what they do. For example upgrading the restaurant means better food score.

The actual course designing is quite satisfying too. You start with your tee box and place your hole to get the length of the hole and then build out from there. Decide on the size of your green, lay down some fairway, rough, water and bunkers and away you go.

There is a good rating system in place as well for each hole which will show you a letter grade to ensure you have enough of each of the 4 pillars of a good hole, tee box, green, fairway and hazards. This is where I wish I was more creative. I was easily able to make A+ holes, but my designs wern’t exactly the most complex. Practical maybe, but not overly good if it were a real golf course. I’m sure you will be much more creative than I.

The only minor gripe I had with the actual building of holes was how you laid down the different types of course. You have to cover each individual block of land you want in order to lay down whatever it is you were wanting to put down. It would be nice to just create a grid of fairway for example rather than lay 100 individual pieces of fairway. This would just save a bit of time, but as I said not a major issue.

Management…Optional?

There is also a management component to running a successful golf course, and this is a mixed bag. The actual systems in place are fine and make a lot of sense. You hire gardeners to keep the course well kept, cleaners to clean up, and assistants to run your shops and restaurants. There’s also trainers to help your customers get better at golf and later on you can get food vendors to walk your course.

Beyond that though there isn’t too much for you to actually manage. You don’t control prices and while you have to keep the golfers and your staff happy, there isn’t really a need to? Whether the golfers hate your course and facilities or love it, they keep coming and paying. If your staff are miserable they still keep on working. Also, you don’t seem to have too much control over how happy they are?

Some might look at that as a good thing as it makes the game super accessible for just about anyone. The super frustrating part however is that you actually need them to be super happy in order to obtain stars on certain levels.

On one level one of the requirements is to get 85 staff happiness. The problem is it was impossible to actually get without any control over their happiness. Staff work and get tired. As they get tired their happiness goes down. Eventually they head to the staff room or clubhouse to rest and their happiness goes up to 100%. Sounds simple enough, but you have no control over when they go for break or anything. So I always had some happy, some not happy.

My only workaround was to just pause the game and fire everyone that wasn’t happy and advance that way. They’ve since had a few patches and things have gotten better when it comes to staff happiness, but more could still be done to help this.

Let’s Play A Round

The other big element of Under Par is that you can actually play the courses you build. You have your own avatar that you level up through the game. Every time you earn a star on a career level you get some points to put towards your avatar to help your power, accuracy and imagination.

The actual golf here is quite fun. It’s by no means like playing PGA 2K or anything like that, but I often found myself just hoping into my course and playing a few holes while I waited for more money to come. There’s a basic swing control where you hold down for power and then use the timing to get the right accuracy.

Perhaps the best part of it is that it doesn’t hold your hand much. It will show you on a HUD how far your ball will go if you hit it perfect and shows you the distance your clubs hit and the distance to the hole, but that’s it. You will have to figure out just how hard you should hit it.

While you likely aren’t coming to Under Par Gold Architect to play a round, it is certainly a good aspect and one worth checking out. Who wouldn’t want to play the course they built, if for no other reason than to test how it actually plays!

Verdict

Under Par Golf Architect brought me back to my childhood days of SimGolf in all the right ways. While they could do a bit more in terms of making the management side of the game having more of an impact, everything else hit like a perfect drive.

If you are looking to create your own golf paradise, Under Par will certainly help you scratch that itch. So create your dream, test it out and then go have a beverage on the 19th hole.

Under Par Golf Architect was reviewed on Xbox Series X. We’d like to thank publisher Gambit Digital for providing a review code for purpose of this review.

The game releases on April 16th, 2026. The golf course management simulation game will be available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, and Nintendo Switch 2.