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Brunswick Pro Bowling Review (X360)

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Brunswick Pro Bowling Review (X360)Crave Entertainment
Ever since Wii Sports came out in 2006, bowling has always been my motion control measuring stick. If your fancy motion controller can get bowling right, it is usually all right in my book. Kinect has actually already proven it can do bowling justice with the excellent bowling mode in Kinect Sports, but there was certainly some room for improvement. A new title carrying the Brunswick (pretty much THE name in bowling) license should be able to give us a bowling videogame like we've never seen before, right? We have all of the details here in our Brunswick Pro Bowling for Kinect review.
Game Details

  • Kinect Sensor Required
  • Publisher: Crave Entertainment
  • Developer: FarSight Studios
  • ESRB Rating: “E" for Everyone
  • Genre: Bowling
  • Pros: The actual bowling is pretty great
  • Cons: Awful presentation; terrible menus; lack of modes; manually skipping replays; aiming sucks

Gameplay

I'll start with the good news first. In my testing, the actual bowling is remarkably well done. This seems like one of those games where having Kinect calibrated correctly will really pay off, though. I had no problems playing it, but reading some user reviews and feedback around the 'net shows some folks can't get it to work at all. Don't hate, calibrate.

For the most part, the bowling mimics how you roll in real life surprisingly well. You have to stand still and can't step into your throws, but you get used to it. Almost everything else, though, is spot on. You can step left or right to position yourself in the lane, and you throw by making a normal bowling throwing motion. In a surprising touch, the game can actually detect wrist movement, and I was able to spin the ball both left and right with a flick of my wrist in the proper direction at the end of a roll. You can also get a much bigger hook if you bring your arm across your body during your follow through (not quite natural, but that is the limitation of videogame bowling for now). My real life style is fairly straight with a little mini hook into the pocket at the end, and that is exactly how I played Brunswick Pro Bowling from the very first ball. I was definitely impressed.

What isn't so hot about the gameplay is trying to set up manual aiming to try and pick up spares. It is just plain awkward to try to bring up the aiming arrow, and then trying to get it to actually line up where you want. I found it much easier to pick up spares by simply moving over a board or two and throwing a straight ball at it.

We've Got Issues

Now the bad news. The rest of the game is pretty awful. The menus are some of the worst you'll find for a Kinect game so far. It uses the awful style where the cursor automatically snaps to the nearest menu option, but you keep moving your hand because you don't expect it, so the cursor jumps around all over the place until you get used to it. And even when you do adjust to it, the cursor still jitters and jumps all over the screen. The menus are also problematic in that there are just too darn many of them. You have to navigate through screen after screen after screen of jittery controlling menus with tiny, hard to read text in order to do anything. Getting into a quick play game takes far longer than it reasonably should, and starting a career involves a circus' worth of jumping through hoops just to actually bowl.

Other annoyances include not being able to use your Xbox 360 avatar. Having to manually skip replays after every shot by raising your right arm a little bit, but it never seems to register in the same place twice. You can't watch your opponents bowl online and instead everyone bowls at once and if you finish early you just get to sit there and wait. Switching between players locally is awkward and causes the game to flip out as it struggles to adjust to a differently sized person.

The more you dig, the more problems you find. I had hoped that the few extra months of development time from delays would have resulted in a tighter game since the devs could see what did and didn't work with the Kinect launch lineup, but that definitely wasn't the case.

Graphics & Sound

Presentation-wise, Brunswick Pro Bowling is pretty mediocre. The characters are all pretty simple and bland looking, but the handful of bowling alleys look all right. As good as bowling alleys can look, anyway. The menus, as I said above, are hard to navigate due to small-ish, hard to read text, which posed a bit of a problem for us as we had to constantly scootch up to the TV to read stuff, then step back to the 6-8 foot Kinect range to actually play. The sound is similarly middle-of-the-road. The music is repetitive and grates on you after a while. The sound effects of the actual bowling, though, are generally pretty good.

Bottom Line

All in all, Brunswick Pro Bowling is pretty disappointing. The actual bowling gameplay is fine, save for a few small but key complaints, but the rest of the game surrounding it is just plain bad. Only a couple of modes. Bland presentation. And terrible menus that make actually doing anything an annoying chore all turn you off of the game pretty quickly. It just isn't worth the effort even if we did like the gameplay quite a bit. There will surely be other Kinect bowling games. Wait for them, or at least until this one hits $20 or so. Brunswick Pro Bowling isn't really worth the trouble.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.

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