PDC World Championship Darts for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

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, while it technically works, isn't set up how you think that it would be. You start by pressing and holding the stylus on the board where you want to throw it, slide it down the screen to build up power, and then flick it upwards to toss it. Now, you would think that your upward "toss" movement would determine the accuracy, but it's actually your draw downward that sets this, which you can clearly see the status of via a dart that angles back and forth as you move. If you draw the dart back and it isn't straight, you can just let go and try again until your toss will be on the money. Once you know it'll be straight, then it doesn't matter how accurately you swipe up - only the downward motion plays into the accuracy.



There are three difficulty levels, and while anything higher than the lowest setting on the PS2 and Wii versions removes the meter, making it all "feel" based (though it didn't work well at all in those cases), the medium and hard difficulties just turn up the sensitivity. Since you can still clearly see how hard and straight you'll throw it before you swipe up on the screen, this setting doesn't really affect much at all.



So again, all you do is pull back the stylus, make sure your meter looks good and then flick the stylus forward. Since you can see how well you'll do before you commit to the throw, all you're doing is looking at a meter and deciding when it's time to flick upward. That's it, over and over.



PDC World Championship Darts not only doesn't play well, but it goes on forever. In my second major tournament 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 stylus, make sure the meter looks good, 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.

©2009-07-20, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved