Game Reviews

Downhill Bowling

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Downhill Bowling
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| Downhill Bowling

Imagine a sport that never ended. A football match that goes far beyond ninety minutes or a tussle at Wimbledon that lasts into the night.

Actually, anyone who watched Andy Murray's efforts last year will be more than familiar with the latter hypothesis, but the reason such contests have to come to a close is because of our own fragility. Humans need rest.

One sport that has no such limitation is bowling. Beyond that initial exertion to set the ball in motion, momentum takes care of everything. In fact, if you added the odd slope into the equation, there's a good chance that ball would never stop rolling.

And that's exactly what Downhill Bowling (as the title suggests) attempts to do: it's the bowling battle that doesn't end.

Putting you in charge of a ball charging through ten rollercoaster-like levels, you direct it by tilting your handset. The goal is to smash through through series of pins lined up at even intervals.

Notching up as many strikes as you can, along the way you also come across objects and power-ups that can either give you or boost or place a literal stumbling block in your path.

The combination of the two means you either knock down scores of skittles or end up slipping into the gully. The later levels usually involve a combination of the two, but at the outset Downhill Bowling focuses on your speed and the angle you take approaching the pins.

The opening tracks are sleek and designed to aid you, boosting your speed with arrows placed on track that send you flying, cannons that fire you towards the pins, and steep drops that keep your pace constant and dizzying.

The warm welcome doesn't last long and other more challenging elements make their presence known: sheep that sap your speed, and coloured mushrooms that invert your steering or give your ball a severe case of the shakes.

Far more difficult are the tracks themselves, which become increasingly narrow and perilous, with grand swinging bends increasingly hard to navigate at speed. It's not as if avoiding such perils is really an option. Descending each hill are coins that add to your point total, which is your ultimate goal.

Downhill Bowling is a fun light bite, but there are a notches in the woodwork that taint play. For a start, slowdown rears its head in some of the latter levels.

More annoyingly, it's possible to get trapped in the game's chasms, stuck between level architecture with the only means of escape a complete restart.

Though incredibly frustrating when it happens, such a flaw isn't quite a game breaker and is no doubt a factor that will be taken into consideration when it comes to future update.

As such, Downhill Bowling is something of a rough diamond, taking a fairly simple idea and having a ball with it. GameResort needs to ensure that its glitches have been smoothed out before this bowling revolution can be considered anything more than a spare.

Downhill Bowling

Taking bowling's pin-smashing fun, Downhill Bowling is just a few glitches away from being an essential purchase
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Keith Andrew
Keith Andrew
With a fine eye for detail, Keith Andrew is fuelled by strong coffee, Kylie Minogue and the shapely curve of a san serif font. He's also Pocket Gamer's resident football gaming expert and, thanks to his work on PG.biz, monitors the market share of all mobile OSes on a daily basis.