Mere Mortals is not a name that you hear everyday in the games industry. As such, it might surprise you that they have had their fingers in the pies of hundreds of games, from conversions and ports, to being subcontracted to work on other developers’ franchises, and of course working on their own original titles. PDC World Championship Darts 2008 is their latest original game, and we got to play a preview build exclusively, as detailed in our feature. What do we actually think of the game, though?
PDC World Championship Darts on Playstation 2 was somewhat of a surprise hit when it first appeared. Unexpectedly, in the run up to Christmas 2006 it became a big seller, reaching into the upper end of the best seller charts with online retailers such as Play.com – the official PDC licence being attached no doubt helping out. With this success in hand, it was perhaps inevitable that a sequel would rear its head to capitalise on the clear interest that the market displayed in darts games. Luckily for us, Wii has also appeared since then, and so as well as a Playstation 2 sequel, PDC 2008 is also coming to Nintendo’s console. Unlike many other PS2/Wii multiplatform titles, however, the Wii offering is not a mere port – it is in fact the primary version that is in development.
You only have to look at the presentation of the game to see that PDC 2008 is intended to best the original in every way. Immediately seeming bigger and better, the overall quality of the menus, the in-game visuals, and the whole presentation has been obviously polished up. Whereas the first game was passable on this front, it pales in comparison to the new version. The most impressive visual feature of PDC was the faces of the darts players, which were pretty close to real life, but they had their restrictions – little movement, for example. Now, though, with a whole new engine, the rest of the visuals have been beefed up. The faces are now even more impressive and have more expressions (maybe also thanks to the team being allowed more access to the players themselves, rather than hunting around the Internet for images they could use as sources). The character models in general have been spruced up so that they resemble the players more accurately, and everything has a cleaner look. The animation is more natural too, thanks to hours of study of the professional players’ mannerisms and postures with footage of matches, as well as more use of motion capturing. It’s still not the prettiest game you’ll ever see, but it’s safe to say that quite a lot of work has gone into making things look hugely better over the first PDC title.
This isn’t the only area of improvement, though. The modes that existed in the first game have been expanded to include more – the party games mode, for example, now looks to be more of a focused area than before, geared towards casual multiplayer gaming, ideally for after you tumble in from the pub. The career mode now includes more tournaments than before and allows you to start out either as a professional player who must keep his stature, or as a newbie who must make their way through the ranks and prove themselves to be worthy of matching up to the (literal) big boys. What tournaments you qualify for, and your ranking, is determined by how much money you are able to earn by winning matches – lose too much, and your bank account is going to take a hit and send you plummeting down the ranks. If you choose to start out as a new player, you can create your own in the expanded Create-A-Character mode. Whereas in the original PDC you could only do some basic customisation, the 2008 edition gives you many more options to consider, from the appearance of the character, to their favoured dart types, to even setting a signature technique (i.e. the numbers they prefer to hit to finish a match). You can also now choose the gender of your created beasts, just in case you really want to be a female darts player this time around.
Source: Cubed 3