Bowling is a time-honored classic American game. From a teenage hangout to a middle-aged beer league, bowling alleys are great places to kill time and have fun in pursuit of that elusive perfect game. Now, developer Game Resort has brought that fun to your Android handset in Doodle Bowling, an animated bowling game with some decent physics behind it.
Gameplay: Traditional bowling – bowl 10 frames and try to get the highest score possible. Strikes, spares, and even gutter balls are included, and split shots keep you on your toes, just like at your local lane. The game keeps track of how many strikes and perfect games you’ve accumulated, and even keeps your 12 highest scores (and strike totals) saved on the main menu. You also earn one credit per game bowled, and you can redeem those credits in the main menu to unlock new lanes in the Themes tab.
Features:
- 13 unlockable lanes in addition to the default
- Attractive hand-drawn graphics
- Intuitive and simple touchscreen controls
- Local High Scores
Graphics: The levels range from the default, a simple lane scribbled on crumpled graph paper, to a collection of unlockable exotic lanes, including a mountaintop, undersea, a real bowling alley, an abandoned mine, a volcano, and even outer space. The graphics overall find a nice balance: simple animation, but still good looking.
Sound: No background music, but good bowling alley sound effects. It sets the mood while still allowing you to play your own music in the background.
Controls: Doodle Bowling uses a simple and intuitive control scheme: Touch and hold the ball to pick it up, fling up to roll the ball toward the pins, and swipe left or right after release to add spin. The rest is just traditional bowling. You can control how hard you roll the ball, and how severe the spin is, but that takes precise swipes. It’s a very easy game to pick up and play, but requires practice to master.
Overall: This is a fun time-killer that any bowling fan would enjoy, but it could have been a home run with the addition of multiplayer. Bowling is just much more fun with others, and even a local multiplayer option would greatly increase the fun factor. As it stands, it’s still a great game for what it is, and at a fantastic price of free (ad-supported), you can’t go wrong. No Apps2SD support, and forcing A2SD via root causes you to lose all accumulated credits, themes, and high scores when you close the game, so keep that in mind.
Gameplay: 5/5
Graphics: 4/5
Sounds: 3/5
Controls: 5/5
Overall: 4/5
Developer Website: GameResort
Direct Market Link: Doodle Bowling
Click QR Code to enlarge for easy scanning: {rokbox}images/stories/QRCodeLibrary/QRDBowling.png{/rokbox}
