Bowling is one of those ‘sports’ that’s really not travelled well in its trip from the US to Blighty. Over on the other side of the Atlantic, bowling is a high-profile, highly lucrative sport with a dedicated following, much the same as snooker is in this country. Here, of course, bowling is largely enjoyed by retirees in white cardigans, but it’s the ten-pin variety that AMF Xtreme Bowling deals in and it purports to be a faithful reproduction. Although surly waitresses and ten-year-old kids’ birthday parties were conspicuous in their absence.
What’s more conspicuous still is that Xtreme Bowling has been deemed deserving of the full 3D treatment. The lanes, ball, bowler and pins are, if you’ve got a beefy enough handset, gloriously rendered. That’s a pretty big ‘if’, mind; we tested the game on a Sony Ericsson V800 (a 3G compatible handset) and found it to be blocky, unresponsive and lacking in detail. The screenshots here, taken with an LG VX8000, show the game at its best, so beware. The sound, however, is uniformly poor, whatever your handset. Sound effects run to a lacklustre clutter when your bowl canons into the pins and little more; developer Vir2L may as well have not bothered.
If the graphics are the high point and the sound the low, the control and playing experience fall somewhere in the middle. Your virtual bowler is controlled by a series of meters and gauges: there’s one for your position on the lane, power, direction and spin. All of which combine to take much of the fun out of the process as it takes too long to prepare and execute a bowl. Spontaneous, it ain’t.
Playing against your friends or the CPU (there’s a tournament mode on offer) is a cumbersome and protracted experience, and while the technique required to score effectively is easy to pick up, there’s very little fun to be had at all. If you must go bowling, save your money for the real thing.
AMF Xtreme Bowling
The digital equivalent of a gutter ball, you’re better off spending your money in the alley
