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IGN Review of PDC World Championship Darts
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. If you choose to use the Nunchuck, you aim with the Wii Remote, then pull the Nunchuck's analog 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.
On the lowest difficulty setting, you have a meter in the bottom-left-hand corner of the screen that shows you how powerful your throw currently is. This works, but then all you're doing for the entire game is managing a power meter. If you play on the Pro or Master skill setting, you don't have this power meter. You can't actually tell how hard your toss is going to be. Your players' arm animation isn't timed with your analog stick movement, so even if you wait for him to flinch and then toss it, you've already built up too much power and thrown it too hard.
If you do choose to play on the Amateur level and use the power meter, then yes, the game does become playable in some minute and vague sense of the word. However, accurately timing your throw is the only thing you'll ever do in this case. 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.
With the Wii, you have a second control option of using only the Wii Remote. In this case, you hold the Wii Remote like a dart, aim the cursor and then press and hold A to lock in your target. To throw it, you "simply" make a dart throwing motion and release the A button. Note that unless you have one of those wobbly plastic protectors on your Wii Remote it may come flying out of your hand, so you need to use the wrist strap lest you put a nice crack in your display or injure your cat.
The reason that this setup sucks is that your power is set as the precise moment that you release the A button. If you make a nice, smooth throwing motion and then release A just as your hand slows down at the end of your motion, it'll fall short. If you release it at the very moment when your hand is moving the fastest, you'll throw it too high. It's very, very difficult to get this mechanic down correctly, and even if you do it doesn't feel natural. Ideally, the game should have taken the motion input from the last half-second before you released the A button and then averaged that out, but that would be too accurate for this game.
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.
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.
©2009-07-17, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The game has numerous fundamental issues. One major thing is that the control scheme totally and completely sucks. If you choose to use the Nunchuck, you aim with the Wii Remote, then pull the Nunchuck's analog 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.
On the lowest difficulty setting, you have a meter in the bottom-left-hand corner of the screen that shows you how powerful your throw currently is. This works, but then all you're doing for the entire game is managing a power meter. If you play on the Pro or Master skill setting, you don't have this power meter. You can't actually tell how hard your toss is going to be. Your players' arm animation isn't timed with your analog stick movement, so even if you wait for him to flinch and then toss it, you've already built up too much power and thrown it too hard.
If you do choose to play on the Amateur level and use the power meter, then yes, the game does become playable in some minute and vague sense of the word. However, accurately timing your throw is the only thing you'll ever do in this case. 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.
With the Wii, you have a second control option of using only the Wii Remote. In this case, you hold the Wii Remote like a dart, aim the cursor and then press and hold A to lock in your target. To throw it, you "simply" make a dart throwing motion and release the A button. Note that unless you have one of those wobbly plastic protectors on your Wii Remote it may come flying out of your hand, so you need to use the wrist strap lest you put a nice crack in your display or injure your cat.
The reason that this setup sucks is that your power is set as the precise moment that you release the A button. If you make a nice, smooth throwing motion and then release A just as your hand slows down at the end of your motion, it'll fall short. If you release it at the very moment when your hand is moving the fastest, you'll throw it too high. It's very, very difficult to get this mechanic down correctly, and even if you do it doesn't feel natural. Ideally, the game should have taken the motion input from the last half-second before you released the A button and then averaged that out, but that would be too accurate for this game.
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.
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.
©2009-07-17, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved