Review | PDC World Championship Darts 2009

Format: Wii | Genre: Sports | Publisher: Oxygen | Developer: Rebellion | Release Date: 29th May 2009 | RRP: £39.99

By Barry White

If you’re getting the whiff of shovelware here, rest assured you’re not the only one. Like other lines of sports games with a different year tacked on to the end of each title, this is another typically so-so effort made purely for a quick buck and relying heavily on a famous face to push the product.

In this case, it’s Phil “The Power” Taylor on the front of the box, doing his best to hold a Wiimote like a dart and not look like a fool. This is the follow-up to the 2008 edition, which might well have been the best darts game in the world, but this is a depressingly uninspired effort.

//Shovelware
There’s the standard career, exhibition and practice modes setup you’d expect in any other sports game, and a roster of personalities from the world of darts from which you can pick your avatar. The game also has a basic and bare-bones character creation system with too few options if you want to create your own player, and even a section to customise your own set of darts that actually provides more visually interesting options than the character creator. It’s not a pretty game, even going by what you’d normally expect from the Wii, and the sound and animation work is functional but very cheap and nasty.

Technically the game seems to function as it claims to. You hold the Wiimote as you would a dart, holding the A button at the start of the throwing movement to lock the cursor at a point on the board and releasing it when you want to chuck the dart. A little power meter on the screen will give you some impression as to how much force the game thinks you’re putting into the throw, and to get an accurate throw you need to push the meter into a sweet spot marked on the target cursor. There’s two levels of assist which compensate for  sideways wobble and other movement during your throw, making it easier to make an accurate shot. And that’s about all there is to it.

//Bland, boring, uninspired
Unfortunately the difficulty curve is utterly ruined by this system, as anyone paying attention will easily be able to shoot a perfect game on either level of assist, while those opting not to use it will find themselves seriously frustrated by the spotty sensitivity of the wiimote, specifically with lateral movement. Couple that to the fact that the wiimote just isn’t as easy or as comfortable to hold as a dart and you have a system that is just too difficult for the casual player with assist turned off, and so easy as to be boring with the assist turned on. And that’s the biggest problem - the game is ultimately neither a good nor interesting approximation of the sport it’s based on.

Admittedly, there’s not a lot you can do with darts. Beyond the career and practice modes, the handful of bland mini-games belie this fact. They’re rubbish. Fundamentally, darts is just about two mildly inebriated men taking turns throwing pointy things at cork board while a referee periodically shouts “One hundred and eighty!” If that sounds dull or tedious to you, this title will not convince you otherwise. If you’re a darts fan, then, as my girlfriend thoughtfully pointed out when we tested the multiplayer together, you will probably have more fun playing actual darts. In fact, chances are if you like darts you already own the necessaries, saving yourself from the need to buy this for the frankly outrageous price of forty British pounds.

4/10

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