DartRage review

By Torbjorn Kamblad, Sweden
for www.touchgen.com

Published: September 22, 2009

DartRage is a dart game with four different game modes: 301, 501, Cricket and the special DartRage Poker mode. The Poker mode is a combination of 301/501 and poker with the aim of reaching zero points by hitting poker cards. Both face value, and eventual poker hands are included in the calculation. The Poker mode is a fresh take on both poker and darts.

Up to four players can take turns throwing, and if you have a lack of friends around you can replace them with CPU players. The CPU comes in three levels of difficulty, and plays quite well on hard. You can play the game in single player mode as well if you want to practise.

There are two control methods available, and sadly I can’t get any real accuracy with any of them. The swipe method works best, as it lets you both aim and throw by means of touch controls. Setting the correct strength of the throw is really hard though. It gets even harder when you try to use the motion controls. Then I also fail to aim properly, and at times it doesn’t register my throws at all.

Graphically the boards look quite ok, but both arrows and poker cards look ugly and jagged. The colour palette chosen is murky with a lot of brown used in menus and backgrounds. Some artistic attempts at making the game seem like it has genuine ragged bar feeling can be seen in smudges around edges of menus.

The only sounds used are the thuds the arrows make as they connect with the board. It sounds realistic in a totally lonely setting, where is the bar now? You can play your own music, and hopefully you choose something bright and happy to counter the murky graphics.

DartRage lacks in game modes, as it only comes with single match play. No tournaments or online functionality at all. It doesn’t even keep track of your best scores which is a big letdown in any sports related game.

I can’t recommend DartRage in the reviewed version(1.0). Hopefully developer Raging Skull tightens up the controls somewhat, and add tournaments and statistics tracking to the game. I even had some strange bug when I choose to play against three CPU opponents that the game wouldn’t let me see the game play area but it stayed on the main menu screen while me and the CPU played on. At $2.99 a higher level of polish is expected than that seen in DartRage.

Final Rating

1pt5-stars

DartRage $2.99

The strange bug that kept the game playing at the main menu.

Review disclosure: Any games reviewed on this page may have been provided to us by the developer for the purposes of this review. Note: the resulting review score is never impeded by this fact, all opinions are that of the TouchGen reviewer and not the developer. This is in keeping with our O.A.T.S oath. Read more about O.A.T.S here

DartRage review

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