PDC World Championship Darts 2008 review (Wii)

Darts is an acquired taste admittedly, but it’s never been so popular and therefore there’s never been a better time to release an officially licensed game of the sport. While we’re also reviewing the PS2 version (later this week), we thought the Wii version deserved it’s own review as well, especially as on paper it should provide the more realistic and fun experience…but just as it did earlier in the week (see our NiGHTS review), that piece of paper comes back to haunt me yet again!

PDC World Championship Darts on the Wii is, in a nutshell, a huge missed opportunity. What should have been the most enjoyable darts game ever (due to the Wii’s unique control system) has turned into a bit of a shambles due to twitchy controls and lacklustre production values.

Roland ‘The Tripod’ Scholten…the biggest member of his local darts club

I’m not a big TV darts fan, I feel I should be honest about that from the start, but I do enjoy a game of darts. I’d liken it to my appreciation of chess. I enjoy playing it, and I have great respect for those that are good at the game, but as far as watching it goes, I’d rather watch whatever reality TV show the BBC are wasting our license money on this week. But even though I’m not a regular viewer of darts, even I can see that the production values are far from the ‘Sky Sports’ quality that Oxygen claim they are.

From cardboard cut-out hair, to blocky lifeless crowds, to commentary that gets repetitive within two matches, it all reeks of low budget production and not something that should be associated with an official license. There’s not even a tutorial to enable the player to learn the controls (nor are the controls ever properly explained), something that could have made the game a lot more bearable for beginners.

To learn the game you have to jump straight in to an Exhibition match, where you will promptly be thrashed by an opponent that you have no option of changing the difficulty level of. While you’re struggling to work out why the dart refuses to be thrown at the screen despite your best attempts to mimic the grip shown on the back of the box by Phil Taylor, or why it veered so dramatically to the left when it finally did leave your hand, your opponent is racking up scores of 100+ for a 10-12 dart checkout.

That's darts...

After a few games you do start to get some success, and I even managed two nine dart checkouts in a row, but the throwing recognition is so random that you can go from throwing a 180 in one visit to 26 the next, without any clear indication of what you did wrong. On occasion my onscreen character even did the reverse of what I was asking him to, by going back when I was throwing forwards, resulting in me having to throw the Wiimote backwards just to get him to release the dart (or turning the Wiimote around). You also have to put quite considerable force behind your throw if you want to be able to hit anything up on the higher part of the board, which results in you becoming tired after only a few legs and isn’t ideal for older gamers.

After a while I realised that if I abandoned the grip that they show you on the back of the box (with the Wiimote on its side) and instead adopted a grip of the Wiimote buttons facing upwards, moving the Wiimote up to my shoulder and then launched it towards the TV in a sort of whipping motion, it produced much more favourable and reliable results. Even still the game seemed to struggle to recognise that the A button was held down and instead of throwing a dart it sometimes just moved my reticule down to the lower part of the screen, resulting in me having to line the shot up again.

Peter ‘One Dart’ Manley…no wonder he struggles to win anything!

So far, so 1/10! But, despite the control issues, the awful production values and the Create-a-player mode being the most stripped down and useless creation tool I’ve ever seen (there aren’t even any stats to give your player), PDC still has that ‘something’ that makes it worthy of more than that. Perhaps it’s the career mode, the customisable leagues and tournaments; perhaps it’s the plethora of mini-games (some of which are highly entertaining with two equally skilled and patient players) or perhaps it’s just the fact that you know, deep down, that if they’d managed to get the control method right, that this could have been a very entertaining form of post-pub entertainment. It could and really should have been the closest that a videogame of darts has ever got to replicating the fun of playing the real thing. Though quite why we need a videogame equivalent of a sport that is so easy to play in the house anyway is another point entirely.

With more time spent on getting the controller right (and yes you can use the Nunchuck instead of the Wiimote, but then that makes it identical to the PS2 game, so for an opinion on that control scheme check that review later this week), perhaps a bit more budget and online play (why is there no online play?), I could easily have recommended PDC as an essential purchase for any Wii owner with even a passing interest in darts. Instead it gets a cautious recommendation of ‘maybe worth a rental’ as, by going on the various forum posts online, while the vast majority of people really seem to be struggling with the controls to the point of giving up (which was me after eight hours with the game), a few, albeit very small minority it would seem, are getting the hang of them and really enjoying it.