Before friendslop, there was friendgolf. Sorry, Golf With Your Friends. Released in early access in 2016, Blacklight Interactive’s devilishly competitive crazy golf sim ended up joining Among Us as a Covid lockdown darling, allowing those of us bored with pretending not to betray and victimise our oldest chums on spaceships to do so openly, on cartoon golfing greens. Now Golf With Your Friends 2 is in the works, at Golf 1’s DLC developers Radical Forge, and it sounds like it wants to ensnare you and your mates in a series of club-and-ball arguments for eternity.
Or, at least, longer than in the original. Golf With Your Friends 2 is launching (in full – no early access here) with fewer total courses, but the addition of a new ‘Chaos mode’ provides the option to alter them with dynamic, randomised variations every time you play. And that’s on top of individual hole designs that, based on both trailers and playing early build at the Ukie and Liquid Crimson’s For One Night Only showcase, are already looking more outlandish and treacherous than Golf 1’s stages.
The first game’s most basic course, for example, was a gentle series of straightforward putts in a lovely green forest, the calmness of which was only occasionally shattered by the bellowing of “OH YOU CHEEKY FUCKER” as one ball intentionally nudged another out of bounds. Here, the opening course is a beachside extreme sports park, with skateboarding crabs serving as mobile hazards and grindable rails that a well-placed ball can use for shortcuts (complete with a Tony Hawk’s-style balance meter). Courses only get weirder from there: I didn’t get a chance to play it myself, but I watched a fellow journo struggle through all kinds of zero-G, upside-down ramping, pinball bumper silliness on a space-themed level.
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Chaos mode makes everything… well, not more orderly, obviously. In addition to structural changes to the holes themselves, Chaos mode will dynamically litter them with modifiers like speed boost pads, more of those pinball bumpers, or in the space course’s case, a small army of laser beaming UFOs. According to lead designer Annie Grudeva, you may even see Chaos-ified levels invaded by features of other courses entirely.
“The way it works is across the courses, it spawns different mechanics,” she told me. “The majority of them are custom to Chaos, but we do nod towards the other courses as well. A course is never the same twice – you probably need to do about 10,000 permutations to get the same layout.”
Herein lies the method to Golf With Your Friends 2’s madness. The original ended up with plenty of courses, both dev-made and those constructed by players with the in-game level editor. It had its own mutations too, like Dunk mode – which replaced each hole with a raised basketball hoop – and Hockey mode, which instead went for netted goals guarded by a cardboard cutout goalie. But layout-wise, the courses themselves were static, unchanging. A strategy, or even specific shots, that worked once would usually work every time, unless one of your fellows could successfully boink you astray. Chaos mode therefore aims to keep familiar courses interesting by remixing each round with unexpected twists and dangers.
Radical Forge CEO Bruce Slater explained as much when he took to For One Night Only’s stage. “The real problem with Golf 1 is when you’ve done a hole, you’ve done it. It’s over,” he said. “So we were like, let’s add Chaos mode, let’s make sure that works in Dunk and Hockey, let’s update Dunk and Hockey modes, let’s make sure the level editor is as child-friendly as possible, let’s make sure that as many people can make things for it and do as much content as possible. Let’s keep the game alive and update it for as long as we possibly can, and take the community that already exists on the journey with us.”
It’s hard to argue with Slater on the original: I happily dumped thirty hours into it during its lockdown peak, but haven’t returned to it in years. Even on its supposedly simplest course, though, Golf With Your Friends 2 was quick to remind me of how effectively this brand of ball-pinging can toy with my emotions. Perfectly guesstimating the power bar, and watching the subsequent shot sail over pits and slide through tunnels for a clean hole-in-one, may be the closest you can come in a golf game to feeling like God. Likewise, repeatedly fluffing an unobstructed putt up a small hill, the ball tumbling down each time like a wheel of Gloucester cheese, feels like an eternity in Hell.
Slater also touched on another driver in Radical Forge’s bag of replayability clubs: the sequel’s level editor. This time, the course creation tool is being revamped for ease of use, in a push to get more golfers (and their friends) involved with the business of building and sharing custom levels.
According to Grudeva, this push was partially inspired by Roblox, Fortnite Creative, and Fall Guys Creative: UGC platforms so simple a child could use them, and they do. “We spoke a lot about something that we call ‘The Lego Snap,’ where placing tiles feels very quick, very snappy, very responsive,” she said. “And building courses is just something that’s really fun and creative – still having the level of complexity of Golf 1, but not having it so much in your face. Having the beginning experience be a little bit more curated, a little bit more welcoming for everyone, rather than just treating it as if you know all these old school modding tools. This is much more of a creative mode.”
I’m not as personally enthused for this feature as I am for surprise alien laser ambushes – after all, I’m only a skilled game designer in my dreams – but the sequel is expanding things for us mere consumers too. Golf With Your Friends 2 supports crossplay, unlike its predecessor, and it covers both general multiplayer and custom courses, with sharing duties shifted from the PC-exclusive Steam Workshop to the console-welcoming Mod.io. This might add a few steps to installation, but at least opens up the DIY level market, making any console-made levels available on PC. And vice-versa.
More accessibility is rarely a bad thing in a party game, and ultimately, that’s what Golf With Your Friends has always been. My only lingering worry – and with an Autumn 2026 release planned, there wouldn’t be much fixing time left – is that the unpredictability of Chaos mode, which does appear intended as a crucial component rather than a novelty side-mode, might narrow an otherwise broad appeal. I never only played the original with other hunched-over PC game regulars, after all. We were joined by siblings and friends-of-friends, people who’d play on knackered work laptops and didn’t even have Steam accounts until compelled to create one by a worldwide plague.
Can we get that band back together in 2026? Dunno – I haven’t asked anyone. But it is encouraging that Radical Forge have, at least, considered the impact of Chaos mode on more casual punters, and believe that its randomised anarchy is still all in good fun.
“Do we give people something that’s just for the most hardcore players, or is this to make things even more fun?,” Grudeva asked me, knowing the answer. “It’s a silly golf game. We’re not gonna make Dark Souls: Golf.”