At a glance...

Previewer	Platform	Publisher	Developer	Players	Release Date	Screenshots
Matt Bailey	PC	Oxygen Interactive	Mere Mortals	1-2 (Take turns)	11th January 2008	Here

PDC World Championship Darts 2008 preview

Darts is one of those sports that some people won't acknowledge as actually being a sport. Poker is another one of them, but while that may have had many games focussing on it - including Oxygen's sister series World Championship Poker - darts is rarely covered by the video games industry. Well, developers Mere Mortals wants to put that right with the second entry in their PDC World Championship Darts series - the PDC standing for the Professional Darts Corporation, one of two major bodies governing the sport in the UK. While it's disputable who is official, the game is certainly licensed, and thus features some of the major players in world darts playing.

It is unfortunate that my first impression of WCD was of the broken menu system. The consolified menu's mouse support was unworkable, but thankfully I found a solution. Upon receipt of the code I was sent an e-mail from the ever-friendly PR guy responsible for the game, who informed me that I should try an Xbox 360 controller for it, and that not only did the game support it, but it was a more natural fit for the controls. Little did I expect that the only way I could actually use the mouse was to plug in said controller, where upon I could also use the controller to navigate the menu. The game itself was then playable with either control scheme, selectable from a prompt that comes up as you begin.

The gameplay is pretty self-explanatory; it's darts. You control the throwing through movement back and forward of the mouse or the right analogue stick on the 360 controller. You set power on a bar that goes up and down as you pull back, and the straightness of the movement will determine accuracy. It seems to work reasonably well, but it will take some getting used to. Unfortunately the advice on the controller was correct, and you will find it easier to control the game with the 360 pad than you will the mouse and keyboard, which isn't particularly convenient for most PC users out there, but we'll see if this changes with the full game.

Graphically WCD is clearly not aiming high, but as this is also getting a release on the PS2 and Wii, it's not surprising that the PC version looks quite rough compared to recent titles on the platform. There's nothing particularly wrong, however, and indeed the preview code held up rather well on this front, but it's simply a higher resolution version of what's offered by the limited capabilities of those two consoles. Comically, the main menu looks worse at a higher resolution than the default 800x600, with the images stretched and blurred to cope with the extra pixels required, though again this is something that could change ahead of the final release.

The game is offering a variety of modes to take part in, including a career mode that pits you against the known players, through to single matches, and a range of other games. These other games feature the kind of darts rules you might play down the pub, such as round the clock, and are a welcome addition for those who enjoy darts outside of the conventional rules. Multiplayer, however, is limited to offline action only, likely to be a result of the focus on the two consoles mentioned earlier, with the 'take turns' play available here seeing just one controller allowing two people to compete on the same PC.

So, while there are some minor problems as the moment, as this game is unfinished, we'll just say that it needs a bit more work, and hope that things are better when the full game comes out. We've seen it happen to a much greater extent before with El Matador, so we hope Oxygen can pull it off.

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