Review of date night Bowling-EGM _

As far as I can remember, we've never had a video game that combines dating and bowling until this week's release of Date Night Bowling, and I have no idea how that's possible. Combining these two activities makes a lot of sense. I remember when my future wife and I went bowling as one of the activities we did on our first day together. Bowling is fun, offers lots of opportunities to talk with your partner, and can provide that exciting mix of supporting each other while trying to outdo each other.

So when I received the review code for Serenity Forge's Date Night Bowling, I didn't hesitate to give it a try. Unfortunately, the game ended up being a turkey, and not in the bowling sense.

Date Night Bowling gives players the chance to choose one of 10 characters - five men, five women - and then choose someone from the remaining list to go out on a date with. Initially, only two characters are playable, and at first I felt stupid for not knowing how to unlock the rest. It turns out that you have to take each of the remaining eight people bowling on their own, and after playing a match, they'll make some comment about wanting company, which unlocks them in the main dating option. This seems like an odd decision to me, as it might have made more sense for everyone to be unlocked from the start, or for unlocks to come from doing especially well on a date with the bowlers you already have.

Once you have chosen your character and outfit, you can choose between two different bowling lanes, the weight of the ball, the hand you play with, the amount of oil in the lane, and the level of difficulty (which alters the speed of the meters when bowling). The game begins with the two characters paired up in what appears to be some sort of singles gathering, and then off to the lanes to go bowling. The controls are basic, as you adjust your starting position, the pin you aim for, and then use the appropriate timing on two meters to determine the power of your shot and the spin of the ball. As you and your partner take turns, there's a bit of small talk based on how each bowler has done.

After each frame, the dating portion of Date Night Bowling kicks in. Your success or failure in wooing your date is achieved by playing nine different mini-games (inserted after frames 1-9), which are randomized each time. Most of the minigames are themed around things you can do in a bowling alley, like getting shoes for your date (although if they ask for shoes at eight squares, they might be too stupid for a date), refilling their drink, engaging in conversations or win a plush toy from the claw machine. Some of them feel a bit forced, like giving a proper high-five or throwing popcorn into your date's mouth, while one of them, fixing a mechanical breakdown in the lane, struck me as oddly bizarre. The better you do in a minigame, the more your connection meter will fill up; the more the meter fills up, the better the date.

And, really, that's it. Date Night Bowling isn't an incredibly deep game, but more of a fast-paced, arcade-like experience. When taken as such, the game is enjoyable. The bowling part isn't as exciting or interesting as other games we've had before (especially one we'll talk about shortly), but there's nothing really bad or broken on a gameplay level either. The dating aspect seems shallow, but with so many different combinations of people to match up with, you can do a lot of loops and still see something new. And above all else, Date Night Bowling has some gorgeous visual effects, highlighted by its stellar character sprites.

The problem is, to my dismay, almost every decision the development team made to build that kernel was either wrong or underdeveloped. I can't remember the last time I disliked so many different things about a game as simple as I did with Date Night Bowling, and I'm frustrated with how good the game could have been if things had gone differently.

Game wise, as I said, there's nothing wrong with Date Night Bowling. What is wrong, however, is the energy level. In short, there is none. As the ball rolls down the lane, your character and date remain emotionless, appearing bored with their own game. Once the pins are knocked over (or not), the person who has been spotting will make an almost generic statement about what happened, and those statements are shared by all the characters. There is no emotion or personality in what happens. You never see your character nervous, or excited, or disappointed, or angry about how they've done it. You have two people who are said to be on a date who never really cheer each other up, or build any sense of rivalry or camaraderie. And, his skill (or lack thereof) at bowling does nothing to increase or decrease the connection meter.

Contrast the way Date Night Bowling depicts actual bowling with something like SNK's 1990 NeoGeo release, League Bowling. Once you hit the ball down the lane in that game, the screen comes alive with movement and emotion, and then the reaction to what happened. Compared to the slower, longer run around the lane, League Bowling is fast and kinetic. I'm not saying that Date Night Bow ling should be as over-the-top and ridiculous as SNK's offering, but rather that it should have some energy and show emotion in what's going on. And it should also have more of an impact on the date overall, because of course the better two people bowl, the more they're going to enjoy the date. (Or, conversely, if you're both totally lousy, that could be a source of bonding, too.)

Missing that element, the Date Night quotes portion Bowling only appears between the frames, and yet here too it seems to be missing a lot. Why couldn't the relationship have been developed more outside of the minigames? Why not let us see the two characters sitting on a break, and insert some real dating game elements like a conversation system? There are some quick and scattered chats, but they're all preset, and if you play twice with the same partner, you'll have the exact same chats each time, at the same time. (Speaking of which, why does the only redhead have to be such a hateful influencer gremlin?) There's nothing that changes the course of a date beyond your performance in the minigames, which means there's little sense of growth or advance by playing with the same partner more than once.

Look, I get it: With so many possible pairings, even adding some variety would mean a significant increase in the amount of text to write. However, as it stands now, there is no reason to be attached to any of the matchups that can be formed. Even if, for example, the game had offered something like a tag team tournament or some other possibility to play against other teams with your favorite pairing, that would have given the relationship aspect more depth.

As said, the depth we get comes from the minigames, and they're not good enough to carry all that weight. If the rest of Date Night Bowling were any better, the selection of minigames here would be nice, but at the very least they could be tweaked. There is a type of gameplay that repeats three different minigames, where you have to press buttons in time to mark a timeline. The problem is that if you hit a marker, an additional visual appears to indicate it, but that effect can block the view if the next note is nearby.

In another, where you give your date a back rub, there are five dots in a horizontal line, and you have to hit each dot as it lights up. However, even when using the D-pad, the game isn't accurate to the touch. So, for example, if I'm at the leftmost point and the second from the right lights up, it would take three taps to the right on the D-pad to get to that point. But the precision of that minigame is bad, so sometimes it takes me to the point next to the one I want, or to the point before, and that's very annoying.

It's easy to screw up the mini-games in Date Night Bowling, but in order to get a date that fills your hookup meter to the max, you've got to get nearly every one of them perfect. In the four days I've been playing, I've never maxed out that meter, because even a single "OK" can ruin your chance. For some people this won't be much of a problem, but for me it caused me an endless amount of stress every time I was about to play a mini-game, which I suppose could represent the stress we all feel to get the perfect date.

Date Night Bowling is a fantastic idea brought to life in a middling gameplay marred by a series of questionable decisions. If you're looking for a simple bowling game with a unique twist, that's what you'll get here, and it just might be enough to keep you satisfied for as many times as you want to play it. However, if you hear the name "Date Night Bowling" and expect that concept to result in a time when we've received a ton of top-notch games that mix dating elements with other genres, you're going to be sorely disappointed. Date Night Bowling may not be a gutter ball, but it is bowling granny style while wearing gutter guards and you still can't hit the spare.