I was acutally out there yesterday doing a course rating and played it afterwards. The course is quite good in most respects. The routing goes up and down over a couple of hills. It is walkable, but not for the faint of heart. The basic terrain is used and not a lot of dirt was moved in the routing the holes.
It is a standard 4-10-4 par 72 layout. There are many areas of tall fescue that put a premium on driving the ball accurately. Once you get a ball in the fairway, the areas around the green feature more normal rough in most cases. The greens are quite severe and some of them feature some serious slopes between tiers. They are usually very firm and fast. They have lots of interesting contours in them and aren't just the modern flat levels separated by slopes. The bunkers are all quite deep. Not Fox Chapel deep, but definitely Oakmont deep.
The par 3s are all slightly downhilll. None of them really stands out in my mind as wonderful, but none are terrible either. The best par 3 is probably the 14th which is a 215 yarder to a green that is well protected by a huge deep bunker to the left and a nasty little grass pot short and right. The average player will try to stay away from the bunker and make the mistake of hitting the heavily roughed pot which is much harder to escape from.
The par 4s are an interesting mix of long and short, tough and easy and provide some interesting options. My favorites include the 13th which is about 450 yards with a pair of bunkers that come in from the left and can be challenged by the longer hitter in order to keep the ball in the fairway which turns slightly that way. From there the green is elevated about 10 feet and has a nice ridge coming off the slope to the left that protects the back left hole location. Another interesting hole is the 17th. This is a 400 yard par 4 that can be driven by the longer hitters. The hole must drop at least 100 feet from tee to green and features a fairway that runs severely to the right when seen from the tee. There is a creekbed that must be carried to reach the fairway and a number of bunkers that also have to be carried. The green is well protected from the tee by a large bunker which is on the right of the green if you just hit it into the fairway. The green itself is a kind of mini-Biarritz with a lower section in the middle. The front section is tough to hold from the fairway unless you try to bounce the balll on through the long/wide fringe cut.
The par 5s are an interesting mix with two that go uphilll, one that is flat and one that drops at least as much as the 17th. This downhill hole is the one that gets the most flack. The fairway is setup as a series of flatter tiers with areas of rough in between. Most players will end up in the first of these which is quite wide and easy to hit, but for the longer hitter who wants to risk it, the hole gets very tricky and some would say unfair. The landing areas are blind and require either a cut or a shot over a large tree and hillside to hit. Once you get there, you might be in a perfectly flat lie with a simple shot down to the green or a severe downhill with your ball hung in the rough.
The major complaint I would have with Totteridge is that the shaping is very typically Rees Jones. For example, the 9th hole is a long par 4 with a hillside to the left. The hillside has been sculpted in regular waves that come out of it and into the fairway. Every wave is the same size and shape. The large greenside bunker by the 18th is another example where there are a couple of capes and bays and all of them are identical. The features are good, but way to regular to look natural.
So, all in all, I like Totteridge in terms of the challanges it presents, but I'm not thrilled with some of the details.