Top Darts
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| Top Darts

The most important aspect of any game that replicates a widely practised real world activity or sport is how closely it mirrors the subject matter. The most popular football games strive for perfect match day recreation and the Gran Turismos are meticulous in their presentation of motorsport.

While snooker, pool, cards, and other by-products of Sundays in the pub have each had decent portable video game representations, darts has never translated well to handhelds.

Top Darts succeeds in getting the basics right, but it over reaches in some areas where it should hold back, and is too basic in some of the places where it should be more complex.

Ichigo-byo

The most important thing about darts - throwing three of them in succession at a circular target - is handled well.

First, you aim the dart by holding down on the screen and selecting the area you want to shoot for. Next, you swipe down and quickly up again in as straight a line as possible, flicking the dart towards its goal.

Deviation either side of this vertical line causes the dart to veer left or right. Put too little or too much force into your flick and your dart will soar above or below its desired point as well. It takes a bit of practice before you'll be able to consistently hit the mark.

Though the analogy isn't obvious, Top Darts shares a lot of similarities with a EA's Skate It, in that it sees you grinding out a - very narrow - move-set until perfect.

This transfers to all of the Classic Games of darts on offer, including: 301 (and its numerical variations), Around The Clock, High Score, Cricket, and more. Each can be tweaked by difficulty, sets per match, legs per set, and so on to provide matches to suit your time schedule. You can also set up custom tournaments and take part in leagues.

The more left-field Arcade Games fare much worse than the traditional types, though, as most are based on beating an opponent on a strict time limit. The pace is almost universally rapid: Stack-Up, for example, asks you to hit numbers as they're called out, building a backlog should you fumble over a few doubles or trebles.

Alien Attack places invisible extra-terrestrial ships on the board, which advance towards the bull and are only lit up by an infrequent sonar wave. Mayhem rotates the board and removes hit numbers, so you'll need to constantly shift where you're aiming.

The Tron-esque change of scenery is neat, but the controls don't let you be as fast and accurate as you need to be, rendering the science-fiction themed games a novelty and nothing else.

Bounce out

Though there's a decent number of customisation options for the game types, it's not a very personal experience. You can set up a profile and take a picture of yourself, but when you take your game to the multiplayer - in ad hoc, competitive, or asynchronous online - there's little in the way of character.

For instance, while you can customise the way your darts look there aren't very many parts. It would have been great to put more of a personal touch to them. Communication options are also basic, which is a shame given that much of the appeal of darts is getting together with friends to shoot the breeze.

Other than some repetitive commentary, the presentation is decent. Each location is highly detailed and lit beautifully, the arrows glide through the air realistically, and menus are clean and clear. There's nothing spectacularly exciting about any of it, though - no stand out moments when the Vita is pushed particularly hard.

Top Darts gets the basics of the game right, and if all you want is a decent no-frills darts title then you won't be disappointed.

But it never goes far enough with the all-important social and multiplayer elements, instead concentrating on wacky but weak game variants that most will ignore after the first couple of matches.

Top Darts

The fundamentals of arrow throwing are executed well enough, but the spirit of the sport in a larger sense isn't, making for a totally acceptable, but soulless game of darts
Score
Peter Willington
Peter Willington
Die hard Suda 51 fan and professed Cherry Coke addict, freelancer Peter Willington was initially set for a career in showbiz, training for half a decade to walk the boards. Realising that there's no money in acting, he decided instead to make his fortune in writing about video games. Peter never learns from his mistakes.