In early January, a new mini-golf course was opened at the intersection of County Line Road and Holly Street, next to McDonald’s. Monster Mini Golf features a course lit by black light, arcade games and prizes that can be won from those games.
Now, I consider myself to be a rather skilled and experienced mini-golf connoisseur, but I found the set-up of this course to be absurd. What started as a friendly get-together turned into a heated fury of hair pulling and club throwing.
Monster Mini Golf is a monstrous failure, in my opinion. At a quick glance, the course is a plain, flat maze of monotonous obstacles, interspersed with poorly functioning animatronics.
Each hole is mounted atop a slanted mound, making it nearly impossible to make even the simplest of shots. I found myself wondering how on Earth they could even manage such a slant on a concrete floor.
Due to my overconfidence in my ability to play mini-golf, I believed that I could manage to only go through the obstacles, not around them. It made the course exponentially more difficult.
The first thing that caught my attention was the use of black light throughout the course. Upon entering the course, I wanted to play because the lighting and the color scheme was fascinating to view; it was not until the second hole that I came to the wretched realization that the black lighting served a greater purpose than to please the eye. It plays games with your mind. It gets in your head and makes the most ridiculously difficult shot seem like a cakewalk. This course has a whole lot of glow, with very little show.
Colorado Journey, another popular mini-golf course in the Littleton area, is a much better choice for your mini-golf experience. The course is larger with 36 holes for the same price as 18 holes at Monster Mini Golf, and is much more enjoyable. The course is outdoors, so you cannot play year-round, but who really plays mini-golf on a regular basis throughout the year, anyways?
Originally, I had absolutely no interest in testing this course due to the fact that it is winter, and mini-golf is meant to be played outside. I cannot say I feel any different as I write this. This course is awful.
I left feeling robbed of $8 and insecure about my ability to play mini-golf. I consider myself to be very competent at “wasting” time on unproductive and useless activities, so to regret spending an hour of my invaluable time partaking in this course says a lot.
In the end, only one hole stood between me and a fair victory. The cause of my demise was a dastardly designed two-sided ramp, with the hole sitting dead center at the top. I hit the ball; it rolled almost all the way up and came back down, rolling all the way past where I originally hit it from. I took two or three more hits getting it in position for my second try. This time, I hit it with a little too much power, and it jumped over the hole, rolling down the other side away from me in the opposite direction.
Another problem I faced was that these holes have a constant flow of air shooting out of them; who knows why. I am convinced that this air would push my ball away anytime it would come close to going in. An invisible barrier around each hole is trickery at its finest.
I am sure countless parents have already brought their young children to play, expecting a good game of old-fashioned mini-golf. I would be furious if I had played this at a younger age.
How is a six-year-old, whose club is twice his size, supposed to play this course when Frankenstein is squealing in the corner, and the jack-in-the-box is randomly jumping up to say hello for the thirtieth time? To add onto that, every time he gets close to ending the misery of each hole, his ball gets thrown halfway across Canada from the air vents.
If you think you would stand a better chance against this course, I challenge you to test yourself. Although I fell to this monster, maybe you will prove a worthy foe for this course. I wish you the best of luck; hopefully you will score better than I did.