The premise in two parts of date Night Bowling is right there in the title: you go bowling, and you go out together. Developed by Serenity Forge and published by Way Down Deep, Date Night Bowling has its players who are trying to succeed in bowling, a first appointment or both.
When you start the game, you can play alone, against the AI or against a local multiplayer partner. There are ten characters in total including choosing, but you only start with two (Holland and Jasper: we’ll talk about it later).
Each character has a different biography, a personality and style of bowling. You must unlock the rest of the characters by playing them once in solo mode. Once unlocked, you can push them to their dreams of romantic success. You can also adjust minor details like the weight of your bullet and the amount of oil on the track.
The first choices I made on Date Night Bowling went wrong. I opened the game for a fun virtual experience of fake bowling by myself and I saw the two unlocked characters. As such, I thought it was my only options in solo mode. I assumed that I had to unlock the rest of the characters in versus IA. This is not the case.
It is not immediately clear that the game directive to know more about each character by playing through his story means that you have to put them in solo mode. Instead, I took Holland and Jasper in mode versus IA, forcing them both in a nightmarish half-life of the marmot day when they must play and flirt with each other for eternity, to finish with my despair as I wonder when I will play them bowling or flirting enough to free myself from my prison of Sisyphus. All this for a weak hope of unlocking a single character!
I may have understood that I was in the wrong fashion earlier if the mini-games often impenetrable had not prevented me from getting a leading score on the very important chemistry counter. We (Me, Holland and Jasper) We went out, being always rewarded for the good chemistry, but never spectacularly, and I stopped thinking it was because I was not better.
I want to love random mini-games, and I appreciate some of them. They take the form of encounters, like listen to your appointment, catch popcorn in your mouth and win a stuffed animal from the claw machine. I’m glad there was such a variety, but I have to constantly read new directions scrolling on the screen and some games were not repeated very often. The controls were as often capricious. Overall, the mini-game sequences seemed somewhat out of my control.
The mechanics of bowling are quite simple, even if I do not understand the spin mechanics in real life. This lack of spin has translated directly from date Night Bowling. Simple instructions assume that their players know how to play virtually. This makes it unusable for me the characters whose rotation skill is limited. It’s disappointing when it comes to mixing and matching characters for spicy dating simulation combos.
The Pixel Art makes the characters and the charming frame, and it’s fun to see how different personalities interact. Unfortunately, Holland and Jasper say about the same four lines throughout. Personally, if I was at a first appointment and that the man with whom I was (named Jasper, love athletics, has a Macklemore haircut with a bonus cattail) told me to Many times that my bowling improved, I would leave bowling with a first-degree murder charge.
I finally understood that I had to play all the characters in solo mode to unlock them. I would have liked not to have to go so far to get This unlocks. The joy in the game is to associate the characters to see their interactions of dialogue, but at that moment, I was exhausted by the number of solo games I had done.
The local multiplayer is where this game should shine, but the mini-games require a level of precision that is not welcoming for newcomers. I played with my girlfriend, and she had too many difficulties with orders to enjoy the elements of the simulation of meetings. For a game that seems designed to be played in short bursts with a partner or a small group of friends, it’s a frustrating functionality.
I wanted to love Night Bowling so much. His Pixel Art is very well done, not to say super cute, and the concept of a meeting simulation combined with a bowling simulation seemed fun and original. My problems with the bowling mechanics, the confusing user interface and the time I spent unlocking the characters have sufficiently harmed the experience so that I can not imagine bringing this game to holidays. There are solid game ideas here, and I hope that the next title of Serenity Forge will bring together all these elements. But for the moment, although Date Night Bowling does not roll full snowballs, it does not launch a strike either.
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