Earlier in the year we saw the release of PDC World Championship Darts on the Playstation 2. It combined a fairly effective darts game with an interesting control scheme that could keep you entertained for a while. The problem with it was that it was all too brief. Now at the tail end of the same year the game gets it’s release on the more advanced Xbox 360.

EA have recently reinvented the sports control scheme wheel with their unique analog stick innovations. Luckily other development teams are starting to pick up on this and seeing as EA don’t have a Darts franchise it makes sense that EA’s ethos is applied. Here the left stick controls where your dart ends up while the right is flicked backwards and forward to mimic the arm movement of actually throwing a dart. The truth is you’ll be pleasantly surprised how easy this is to use. Not only that but the learning curve is little to none despite the fact that it takes ages to master.

The bulk of your time in PDC will be spend within the games career mode. Here you can pick between a professional darts player or create your own from scratch. Although saying that you don’t really get too many options for customization. There are only a few different choices for you to make resulting in fairly generic character creation.

Once you’ve made that choice you’ll be going through various events on the Darts Tour. Tournaments, exhibitions and even practice sessions are present. Your main aim here is to win tournaments to earn winnings which will accumulate in the winnings table. Pretty simple and realistic premise behind what your doing but it would have been nice to have a few more things to do because there isn’t much variation from simply playing darts.

It’s this problem that lets the whole game down. It would be easy to blame developers for a shoddy game but the truth is gameplay wise the game holds up fine. Actually it’s quite an achievement that they’ve managed to stretch a simple game over this many modes. But as previously noted Darts is a simple game and the simple nature comes back to bite it. You’re really just doing the same thing over and over again and it will eventually lose it’s single player appeal. Meanwhile the online multiplayer and offline pass the controller modes work great and give you a little bit of long term appeal even if the game mechanics are still the same.

Graphically the game doesn’t look much better than the original on Playstation 2 and when you consider that wasn’t great for that system you’ve got something that looks old and outdated. Crowd noises and other effects work well but are let down by bad music and an overly excited and repetitive commenter. Unfortunately this one where you’ll have to take use of custom soundtracks to drown out the audio.

The controls make it easy for anyone to play but the overall visual and sound presentation of the game lets the product down. Then when you have to consider that Darts is a simple game and PDC World Championship Darts represents it well. Too well to be honest because it’s the nature of the game that results in PDC being hard to recommend to anyone who isn’t a hardcore darts fan.

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