The Golf Club #6

I feel this course was set up to be a great fantasy course. It featured a good variety of holes, some scenic shots, but it did have a few designing flaws. The main problem was the pallette and the boringness of a few shots.

The boringness of a few shots could be attributed to the fact that there are a ton of very similar shots on this course. Most every green is elevated and this does not make for an exciting round.

I felt the pallette was moderately poor. It ruined a few objects, that were used anyways, and didn't look right for the course. I felt that it was not a very good choice. I did, however, like the way that most of the holes were set up strategically to force the golfer to not only hit good shots, but also to make good descions.

It was a good course that could have been a ton better, but overall it didn't cut it for me. It was right on the edge of being great, but the last draw was the pallette. I feel this designer has plenty of potential and could easily create a top notch course in the future.

The set-up of this course I thought was excellent. The holes really demanded good shotmaking, and good decision-making. The tight fairways guarded by bunkers really made your tee shot be very important.

Also, I felt that the scenery in this course was pretty good. The objects and background were really good. I especially liked the objects, which really seemed to help the course tremendously. The pallette here was a good pallette, however, I think that pallette might be more suited to a links course rather than this course.

The main problem with this course were the design "flaws", simple things that can be fixed easily, but if they're there, they hurt a course. First, I found that on a few holes there was fairway running right into water, which is never a good thing. Also, there were also a lot of overdone elevations, which didn't help the course either. Combine these two things, and there were a few times when what seemed like a good shot rolled right into the water (even after landing near the middle of the fairway).

There was one other thing that I didn't care for was that on every hole but one, you were hitting your approach into the elevated green. While this presents a challenge, it gets horribly boring by about the 8th hole, always having to hit your approach shots uphill. There really needs to be variety of uphill and downhill shots.

But, the course ended on an awesome note. The approach to the 18th green is one of the best I've ever seen. You're shooting over a patch of flowers to an elevated green (this was not an annoying one), where the pin is kind of lost in the clouds. It's a great scenery shot, but it is also a great challenge to finish off your round.

Bottom line, if a few design flaws were fixed up, this course goes from a 3 to a 4 or 4.5 easily. Mark shows tremendous potential, and I look forward to seeing his future work.