Should you play these after hours?
After Hours Athletes is a combination of 3 in-door sport games including darts, pool and bowling. It’s actually a combination of 3 PSN games that has Move support. So should you give these a go or just go down the bowling alley or pub to play these?
Top Darts does what you would expect. You use the Move controller as a dart and throw it into the board, but it is very strange as you actually throw darts at the same time as your opponent, it doesn’t make the darts clash or anything, but it does make you rush your shots as it’s the first one to break the 501 score, maybe it was an option I enabled and couldn’t switch off but I just didn’t find it fun at all as a result. The accuracy wasn’t that great either, which is surprising.
Hustle Kings is the pool, which you can set your own rules to. I personally prefer the standard UK version of the game where you get rid of all your colours, then pot the black ball. But the AI is brutal, even on Easy. I just couldn’t understand it, I missed one shot in the beginning and my opponent potted EVERY ball without breaking the chain, even potting balls that seemed impossible to do so. I double-checked and the difficulty was on Easy, how on earth is that meant to be easy? The Move controls are ok, but I still feel they could be tighter.
High Velocity Bowling is probably the best of the bunch because it doesn’t have insane AI or a race to finish a game, having said that the controls aren’t the greatest and considering Move has mocked Wii’s waggle controls, it’s embarrassing to find that their version of Bowling isn’t anywhere near as accurate or as fun as that of Wii Sports/Resort.
The presentation of each game is strong, each has loads of modes and replay value to get your teeth stuck into, but I personally didn’t find any of the games that much fun to play. Commentary is awkward for darts, but luckily you can turn it off…and as with previous PSN collections, you need to exit the game from the XMB and restart it to select another game, which is just ridiculous.
The Verdict
After Hours Athletes makes me want to take the developers down to my local pub and show them how a game of darts or pool is meant to work, since they obviously got confused. I was scratching my head regarding their thinking, then there’s the problems with accuracy that make the Wii look superior, which is humiliating for Move. It’s a real shame…
