The Big Lebowski Bowling

The Big Lebowski is a film about a long-haired, middle-aged man known as 'The Dude', his goonish friends and a bowling alley. It may not sound like much, but the film has such a strong cult following that it has inspired an annual convention, Lebowski Fest, which sees disciples of The Dude travelling hundreds of miles to drink White Russians with like-minded folks. There's even a UK version.

And more to the point, there's now a mobile game. As a concept, The Big Lebowski Bowling is inspired, but can it reproduce The Dude's dilapidated charm?

Not entirely. Underneath the visual references to the film lies a fairly standard bowling sim: you take your position, aim your shot, throw and then apply spin with the '4' and '6' keys as the ball makes its way down the lane.

The Lebowski flavour comes more in the characters you face in the main Tournament mode. Most of them seem to be ersatz variations of what a Lebowski character would be like if he had been penned, resulting in odd avatars and little goading speeches before matches. This is likely to be because the film itself doesn't have all that many characters, rather than as a result of developer Ojom not being allowed to use the official names, since The Dude himself is present.

Unfortunately, all in-game images of characters are pretty shaky cartoon versions of the film actors. You certainly wouldn't recognise them unless prompted, and even then only grudgingly. However, there are nevertheless a good few characters to play against in Tournament mode, which offers a satisfyingly even difficulty curve.

The gameplay itself is more arcade than sim. The dead giveaway of this fact is, possibly, the drinking mini-game where you have to get your character sufficiently full of booze to ramp-up his performance without getting him so sozzled that he launches the ball straight into the gutter. Really, it's a quite superfluous affair and arguably works to the detriment of the bowling itself, but it's presumably there as another film link for fans.

As you might imagine, the overall lack of a preoccupation with authenticity affects other areas, and in play you'll find yourself relying as much on spin as aiming. The Big Lebowski Bowling doesn't recreate bowling physics faithfully to any extent, but – and this should really be more important – it is quite fun.

The graphics are less illustrious than a lot of the rival bowling sims out there, which often seem to take great pleasure in recreating the shine of the polished bowling lane as much as the movements of the ball itself. Here, the cartoon-styled look of the characters carries on over to the bowling alley itself. You certainly won't be swooning at the sight of the game, but the visuals do their job, if with little flair.

Alongside the Tournament mode are the Quick Match and Training modes, where you either play a single match or set up a lane with a specific pin layouts to test your bowling prowess. That may not sound like much and, unfortunately, it's not helped by the fact there's only one alley to bowl in – even if there was just a change of colour scheme, it would have been a very welcome addition.

The Big Lebowski Bowling, then, neither lavishes you with extras, nor stuns with the accuracy of its bowling simulation. But it's got a decent main game mode and, crucially, is not bad fun to boot. Whether or not Lebowski fans will be pleased with the game's loose representation of The Dude is, we suppose, a matter for discussion at the next Lebowski Fest.