Ribbit King review

What could be more fun on a sunny day than making frogs jump through obstacle courses, as you try to get a frog-in-one? Of course there are the weird cartoon snakes to watch out for, occasional ghost attacks and lava pits, but that’s all par for the course.

I am, of course, talking about the imaginary sport of Frolf. Basically, an even crazier form of crazy golf, but with frogs instead of balls - that’s what Ribbit King is all about. Never mind the rest of the plot, it’s even more absurd than Frolf itself, and just an excuse for cute characters to bounce around saying cute things.

Aw, that’s so sweet!

And make no mistake; Ribbit King is one cute game. Obviously pitched at children and adults who don’t mind Mario games (the music would fit perfectly in a Mario title). It’s cuter than a basket of kittens carried by a big old fluffy English sheepdog. On Christmas morning.

If that appeals to you, and you can stop mewling with endearment long enough to play the game, you’d find a fairly basic golf-styled game, with a standard shot power bar, match and stroke play. The unique selling points of Ribbit King’s gameplay (besides those sweet lickle froggies) are the power-ups, score bonuses and multipliers you can string together during each shot.

The croaking green

Each course has a generous sprinkling of power-ups scattered over it. And most of these power-ups affect the course of your frog, not to mention some of the hazards like elephants and monsters which lead to a timed button-press mini-game and can send your frog off in a seemingly random direction, albeit with a chance at bonus points. There are a lot of seemingly random elements to the gameplay, but it is possible to broadly plan a series of shots that chain power-ups together in a satisfying way to the hole, and doing so is surprisingly satisfying.

The single-player game focuses on beating a series of opponents on each course, with humorous cutscenes between opponents. Not unlike watching a surreal Japanese cartoon for pre-schoolers, some (though not all) of these scenes are genuinely amusing.

The opponents in single-player mode aren’t the brightest, but the challenge will mostly come from the courses themselves, which start out simple, and then later become a crazy maze of pits and conveyor belts, adding a definite puzzle element to the game, though one that can sometimes seem more frustrating than fun. For the determined, though, there are extra cut scenes to unlock, special items to find and equip (like tiny little scuba tanks for your frogs) and more frogs to find.

But Frolf seems to be best enjoyed in multiplayer, with someone else around to appreciate the absurdity of it all. Here the greatest reward is to not have to sit through the computer opponent playing through its sometimes disastrous turns.

Not exactly Tiger Woods

Ribbit King is definitely someone’s dream game. Someone who eats a lot of cheese before bedtime. There aren’t any amazing gameplay features, and when it comes down to it, at its heart, it’s a simplified golf game, with the pace and patience that entails.

If you really like the golf-style of play then you’d be better off finding another more accessible golf game. If you were always slightly interested in golf, but needed frogs to make it interesting for you, then you’re just weird. Young children, who Ribbit King seems to be pitched at, might have problems with how slow it plays, and with how tricky the courses becomes later in the game, making it hard to recommend, even though it is easy to pick up at first.

So if you’ve always dreamt of playing golf with frogs, you probably need some kind of therapy, but are likely to enjoy Ribbit King in the meantime. The rest of us will probably find it an amusing curiosity, fun for a little while at least.