Darts

Genre: Sports (Darts)

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Alternating)

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Sabec

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Review:

(Note: This is included in the bundle Classic Games, along with Bowling and Table Tennis.)

Darts, released on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2020, is a simple, straightforward take on the sport. This game uses decent but unspectacular 3D visuals to depict the darts, dartboard, and a game room, with forgettable jazzy music on the title screen but no sound in the game except the sound of darts hitting their target.

This ends anything even remotely resembling good things that I have to say about this game.

For a game as straightforward as Darts, you might hope that there’s an attempt to infuse the game with some depth via different board types, game options, tournament brackets… no. Nothing like that made it into this game. You can only change the visualization for the board and each player’s darts, and you can play single-player versus an AI, or two-player. That’s it. There’s not even a high-score mode here.

Okay, well, perhaps the AI here does something interesting? Nope. In fact, it takes an excruciatingly long time to take its turn, given that it’s not a real person and nothing it does is interactive.

Well, the controls, then? Surely on the Nintendo Switch, which has both motion controls and a touchscreen, this game has some cleverly-crafted and intuitive controls? By this point yo know the answer – no motion controls, no touchscreen.

In fact, it’s far worse than boring controls. Your dart is always pointed at an odd angle from the camera, making it difficult if not impossible to discern where it’s pointing. Making things worse, in addition to a little bit of movement swing to simulate the imprecision of hand movement, once you start to take your shot, your dart will cartoonishly bounce up and down until you release, making it even more difficult to aim your shot.

As a result, it is virtually impossible to aim with anything even remotely resembling accuracy in this game. In a game where the only thing you do is try to aim as accurately as possible.

If there is a good way to do the sport of Darts in a videogame, this game is about as far from that as possible. While I suppose the game doesn’t technically crash or have graphical issues, in all other respects it is virtually unplayable. And even worse, the game’s creator actually priced it at $10, clearly intending to do the $2 eShop scam shuffle. If I could do things all over, I wouldn’t spend two pennies on this game. Aim your sights elsewhere.

tl;dr – Darts is a simple rendition of the Sport with controls so terrible that it’s virtually impossible to aim properly, a horrible lack of options and game modes, and an insulting $10 price tag. Do not buy this game.

Grade: F

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