PDC World Championship Darts

Someone, somewhere, thought making a darts game for the DS was a good idea.  Presumably someone who works for Oxygen Games.  In fact, so enthused with the idea were they that they created a fully licensed PDC game around it with the likenesses of real darts players captured for the screen you don’t look at because you’re playing darts (presumably).

The presentation of Darts is quite passable. Well, the dart board looks like a dart board, the darts look like darts and the darts players look like ...well, they look like the pre-rendered images in a web-site banner ad enticing you to go and play darts for cash on a gambling site.  In short, the avatars and their darts are only skin-deep having no effect on gameplay.

The gameplay of Darts is repetitive. You place your stylus where you want the dart to go, you move the stylus down the screen until the meter gets to what the manual refers to as the “sweet spot” then you flick the stylus up. This is all you’ll ever do. Sure you could argue that shooters are repetitive with their move cursor over face, press shoot button, repeat mentality, but you’ve got different environments, weapons and enemies to look forward to. While the game deserves an extra kudos for creating a mechanic that works and almost requires some skill, everything the player does outside of menu selection is that one action.

The only other detail to these core mechanics is that, on more important throws, like a match-winning throw, the cursor floats around the point where you placed the stylus. On these occasions it’s your job to time the throw to compensate for your avatar’s nervous disposition. The idea is sound, but in practice is just a bit annoying. Also, simply having a to-do list of the criterion to unlock the other avatars would have added a lot to the game, but this isn’t the case.

The audio suffers the same repetition as the gameplay. "Go on, get out of it!" playing on a loop that is about 10 seconds long grates the nerves a bit.  Even if the player can get over the £17.91 price tag, which seems to be the best at the moment, the brevity of looping audio and limited number of samples for any given scenario, such as a paltry five ways of hearing “180!” and the phrase “Confidence, bordering on arrogance” renders any bargain irrelevant.

In the end it all comes down the fact that, no matter what you have to play games on, you can find something similar in the free to £5 price range.  Fair to say then, released as a WiiWare title for a couple hundred points this could add a few points onto the score, but for this price? You would do well to avoid this one.