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Does anyone not know what darts is? While small children probably haven’t had the pleasure to play the legendary pub game or bothered to watch one of the growing number of televised tournaments, surely most people are aware of it. If you are then you’ll probably realise how hard it is to turn into a video game. It’s a game that essentially requires you to throw small metal spears at a target – not the most complex of sports.
Having already played the PS2 and Wii versions of PDC World Championship Darts and found them to be decent stabs at virtual versions of the sport, we wondered how the game would be improved on the Xbox 360. It seems developer Oxygen Interactive had similar problems when thinking about the 360 version. Although presentation has been improved considerably, our first impressions are that this is essentially the same game – if you love darts that’s probably not a bad thing.
The right analogue stick pull back and push forward throwing system returns from the PS2 version and works well, and is perhaps a tad smoother than on the PS2 and certainly more precise than the Wii’s control system. You target an area on the board using the left analogue stick and control the strength and quality of your throw with the right stick – a slight variation in direction on the pull back or follow through will cause the dart to veer off direction.
We haven’t delved too deeply into the career mode, but things seem to be as they were, including the basic player creation tool. We had hoped the 360 game would offer a little more depth, but it seems as though we’ll once again be limited to choosing from a few stock body shapes, faces and accessories. This isn’t EA-quality character customisation, but you can create some fairly fun looking men (and questionable looking women) with green hair and sunglasses – if that’s your thing.
Something the Xbox 360 game will have over the other version is Xbox LIVE play. We weren’t able to test this out in the preview build but it will add another way to play competitive games, and will no doubt be a great bonus for gamers who don’t have any local dart-loving friends. How well it performs online remains to be seen, but it’s unlikely that such a sport will require incredible net code.
If you’re mad about darts and haven’t yet picked up PDC World Championship Darts on Wii or PS2 then this soon to be released Xbox 360 game could be for you. Unless there are big changes between now and its mid-September release though, we can’t see it appealing to anyone who doesn’t laugh at loud at Sid Waddell’s often incomprehensible commentary.
PDC World Championship Darts 2008 for the Xbox 360 is released on September 19. Look out for our review next month.