Be a part of the passion and excitement of tournament darts in your living room with PDC World Champion Darts: Pro Tour. The latest offering in the franchise features six new PCD players plus the top ten from the PDC order of merit including Phil Taylor, James Wade and Raymond Van Barneveld...

The latest addition to the PDC World Championship Darts stable brings the sport of fat men into your living room (so I felt right at home). This time around the developers have used the Wii Motion technology so that you can interactive with the game to give the impression you are actually playing darts... well... sort of. A better description would be that it's like throwing a brick at your TV screen. But to be fair, once you get the hang of it, it works rather well.

There are a number of gaming options. There's 'Exhibition' (where you play a quick game against another player - computer or friend); 'Play it Your Way' (where you can customise various conditions - although not all options are available on all games); 'Career' (move through the ranks); 'Party Games' (two player games which are quite good fun. There are 18 of these in total and these alone are almost worth buying this game for); and 'Practice'.

You can also customise your character from a range of options so that he/she looks a little like you. You can also buy clothing and different types of darts.

To be honest the game is fairly easy to pick up and play and you shouldn't have any real difficulty getting at least one 180 in your first game or two. But as the pressure builds the controller becomes a little less easy to control (by vibrating slightly to try and distract you).

There were a few too many bugs and issues I had with this game that will probably put a lot of people off. Firstly the commentary is annoying and more often than not doesn't tie in with what's happening in the game. During one game my darts didn't remove themselves from the board for about the next three goes, so I was throwing darts on top of other darts. And I couldn't help but laugh at the WWE style intros and entrances of the dart players - yes I know it's what happens in the real tournaments, but it's just so lame.

To be honest though these issues didn't really bother me that much as I'm the sort of person who would only play the odd tournament against the computer and then use this game to play the 'Party Games' with friends.

'Play it Your Way' froze my Wii twice, resulting in a rather loud whine from the console - and I had to unplug and reboot to start again both times - so I didn't bother exploring that avenue any further,

I find myself liking this game, but I'm not entirely sure why. For all it's many faults there's still a great deal of satisfaction to be had when your third dart in a row flies into the treble twenty bed and you hear: "180" screaming out of the TV screen.

6

Darren Rea