AMF Bowling World Lanes for Wii Reviews & Ratings by IGN

Last year Mud Duck Productions released the poorly developed, unnecessary AMF Pinbusters for the Wii. This year Vir2L hits the scene with the next Wii game with the AMF license, AMF Bowling World Lanes. The company learned from a few of its design mistakes except for one key thing: it's still not anywhere close to the quality of Wii Sports Bowling, a free game included with every Wii system in North America, making Vir2L's title, once again, a completely unnecessary addition to the Wii library.



This AMF game has a different developer: Front Line Studios. With the changeover in studio, this "sequel" doesn't share the few and far between "good" elements of the previous AMF Pinbusters. Namely, the control and the pin physics are completely different in AMF World Lanes, and not for the better. Rolling the ball might be a little more consistent than it was in the other bowling game released this year – Ten Pin Alley 2 – but it's still nowhere near as smooth and intuitive as what Nintendo did in Wii Bowling. It's made even sloppier with the ability to throw the ball several seconds AFTER your character walks up to the line in his or her approach, with the same effect. The pins crash into each other a lot more artificially than what's expected out of a bowling simulator – we've seen better pin action in Game Boy Advance bowling games.



The hook in AMF World Lanes has to be its embarrassing and completely unfunny character and location stereotypes. The Scottish bloke wearing a kilt and bowling with his plaid ball. The Brazilian soccer player bowling with, yes, you guessed it, a black and white ball. And so on. It's a globetrotting affair playing in different locations all over the world. The characterizations are just as bad as last year's AMF game, and that was quite possibly the biggest strike against AMF Pinbusters (apart from the inability to play left handed). Added to the standard bowling -- which, if you haven't figured out already, is far inferior to Wii Bowling and isn't even good if it stood on its own – is a really dreadful set of mini-games that aren't much more than the practice mode already included with the Wii Sports package.

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