PDC World Championship Darts for PSP Reviews & Ratings by IGN

Were this any other review, I'd normally begin by talking about the franchise's history, the state of its genre, or perhaps give a little background into its development. For PDC World Championship Darts, I'm not going to bother, instead just outright telling you that this game is complete and total crap.



The game has numerous fundamental issues. One major thing is that the control scheme totally and completely sucks. You aim with the left analog stick, then hold the X button while pulling the stick back to build power and then flick it forward to toss it. The issue is that you aren't exactly controlling the power with the analog stick, but simply starting its build-up. In other words, you can't hold it in place and sort of adjust your distance before flicking it forward. Once you start pulling back, the power starts building and doesn't stop.



You have a meter in the bottom-left-hand corner of the screen that shows you how powerful your throw currently is, and this works for what it is, but then all you're doing for the entire game is managing a power meter.



Accurately timing your throw is pretty much the only thing you'll ever do in the game. Your aiming reticule stays pretty still unless you're going for a triple-20 round or are about to win, in which case it wobbles around so fast that you can't even try to time your toss correctly. By the way, this is a really stupid design decision.



So anyway, again, all you do is pull back the stick, wait until the meter gets to the right spot and then flick the stick forward. It's easy to keep it straight, so it all comes down to timing. That's it. Some might argue that golf games offer the same mechanic. In golf games you at least have to worry about club choice, your current lay, risk versus reward, the wind, your golfer's skill levels, a changing environment, and a number of other factors that actually makes golf videogames fun. Here, nothing changes. Ever.



There is one major flaw in the PSP version of game that I didn't find in either the PS2 or Wii counterparts, which is that you can cheat over and over and over again by aiming at the top of the dart board and then tossing the dart with no power and have it wind up hitting the triple-20 every single time. You have to get your shot straight, but with a little practice this isn't very difficult. The game actually helps you cheat because when the scoring meters extend to show you the number of 120, 140 and 180 point rounds that you and your opponent have racked up, it winds up becoming the perfect target for you, allowing you to use this method anywhere on the dart board to finish out your round. You can of course ignore this cheat and try to do things on your own, but once you realize that you can do this and get into a pinch, it'll be hard not to pull this card out of your sleeve and cheat to take home the prize.



PDC World Championship Darts not only doesn't play well, but it goes on forever. In my second major tournament playing as my created character "Ryan Clement" (the game only supports seven letters in either part of a name, so I couldn't even fit "Clements"), I was playing in the UK Open, a 64 player tournament. That comes out to six full rounds. Good. The problem is that each round was a best of 21 legs. You can replace the word "legs" with "rounds". So, I needed to win no less than 11 games just to beat a single opponent and move on. That means that if you're perfect, you will have to win 66 games to take home the trophy. If you're perfect, you would have to throw nine darts per round to win. That's a minimum of 594 darts thrown if you're perfect. Since you probably aren't, even if you win you'll be closer to 1,000 or more tosses for that single tournament.



So again, pull back the analog stick, watch the power build, and then flick it forward about 1,000 times in a row and you might win a tournament.



Oh, but there's so much more. The announcer is a static model that doesn't move and just stands there with a mic in his hand. When he speaks, he only has one sample per line. Since you will almost always be going for triple-20s, you'll end most rounds with either 100 or 140 points scored, which means you get to hear him say "one-hundred" or "one-hundred and forty!" over and over and over again.



By my math, you'll hear these phrases about five or six-hundred times (or more) in a tournament since you can't skip the computer player's turn. And then there's another one when that's over.

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