Three Fields is a relatively new studio, formed in February 2014. Dangerous Golf is its first release, but far from the team’s first game; Ward, along with nine of the 11 staff members at Three Fields, used to work at Criterion Games, the studio best-known for the Burnout series of arcade racing games. Ward helped found the studio’s game-focused rebranding in 2000 and served as director on some of its most notable games, maintaining an important position even as the studio’s headcount ballooned.

"We wanted to go back to pure game making."

As the team sizes grew and Criterion shifted from making its own games to working on Need for Speed, following an acquisition by video game publishing giant EA, Ward and some of his co-workers — including Paul Ross, lead programmer on the ambitious open-world game Burnout Paradise, and former Criterion studio director Fiona Sperry — felt a desire to get back to the fun they had in those early days of game development. "We wanted to go back to pure game making," he says. In November 2013 he handed in his resignation and started planning for Three Fields.

Among the titles Ward directed at Criterion is the seminal Burnout 2: Point of Impact, which introduced "crash mode," a feature where time slowed down and players tried to smash into other cars to create as much damage as possible. It was a huge inspiration for Dangerous Golf. In fact, Ward likes to pitch his new game as "crash mode but with golf," and the description is apt. At the outset of each level in the game, you’re presented with a golf ball situated in a room that has all manner of things you can destroy. For your first shot, you can hit the ball in any direction, not just forward as in traditional golf games. The goal is to find just the right angle so that it will bounce around the room, causing an untold amount of destruction (as things explode, the game keeps a running tally of the monetary damage you’ve caused).

If you smash enough stuff, you get another shot, this time with a ball that is literally on fire. Then comes putting — each stage has a flag and a hole, sometimes many of them — which works just like in regular golf, except that you can bank a shot off of a gas pump or a kitchen stove. Making the final putt is important because if you miss, a huge cash deduction will be taken from your final score.

There are more than 100 levels to play through, spread across four distinct locations, including a fancy house, complete with delicate vases and expensive paintings, and a medieval castle full of treasures. There’s also a gas station where the pumps can cause some wonderful explosions, and a restaurant kitchen full of fun, messy goodies like pies and hamburgers. Some levels have buckets of paint, letting you make a mess of the walls; others have sinks and toilets that create strangely beautiful fountains when destroyed. There are multiple game modes, including co-op play and stages with time limits, and each level has three medals you can earn depending on your score.