Curling 2010 – Xbox 360 Review (Xbox Live Arcade)

Reviewed by Harry Slater on March 1, 2010

Curling 2010 - Xbox 360 Review (Xbox Live Arcade)  | read this item

In a recent review, we bemoaned the lack of curling in the official game of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. You can only imagine our joy when we found out that Curling 2010 was coming to Indie Games on Xbox Live; our prayers were answered, finally we’d be able to curl some stones, sweep some ice and relive the glory days of Salt Lake City ‘02, when Britain’s curlers stormed the world stage and came home with a shining Gold medal. Unfortunately though, as we settled down to enjoy an end, a terrible realisation dawned upon us; the reason Sega’s official game didn’t have curling in it was simple – curling is dull and stupid and about as much fun as sliding a rock along some ice. Because that’s what it is.

Curling 2010 is a simple looking game, presented in respectable enough 3D. There are no character models or crowds, just a strip of white ice, some painted circles, rocks and a magically hovering broom. You slide the rocks towards the circles, brushing the ice to try and effect the curve and speed but in reality not doing either, with points awarded via a bowls-lite scheme that will only make sense if you’ve been curling all of your life.

There are a variety of modes on offer, allowing the discerning curler to curl in a number of minutely different ways, including; regular curling, practice curling and curling where you have to get a stone to stop at a specific place marked by a purple squiggle curling. You can even curl against your friends on Xbox Live, if you hate your friends, or they hate you.

As a showcase for the game designing talent of the XNA and Indie Games community on Xbox Live, Curling 2010 is a failure. It may replicate precisely the real game of curling, but it’s still boring, blocky, uninspired and turgid. It feels very much like a committee agreed game, rather than a labour of love. Which isn’t really a surprise, as the curling and homebrew coding scenes are hardly easy bedfellows.

There’s nothing particularly bad about Curling 2010, it’s just so brain numbingly dull that it’s impossible to recommend. As a free flash game it might work, but trawling through reams of oft indecipherable instructions to find out how to make the rock go forwards is hardly a task reconcilable with a pick up and play time idler.

The lack of variation on offer is the biggest crime here, there’s nothing to make you feel like you’ve progressed, no change in background or atmosphere or any discernible sign that the curling you’re doing now is in any way better than the curling you were doing when you first figured out the controls. The game may as well be a screen saver for all the feeling of accomplishment it gives you.

The Indie Games Marketplace on Xbox Live offers an excellent mix of games, ranging from retro style platform romps to existential maze games, music visualisers and epic tales about fish listening to radios. As such, this review should not be regarded as an attack on the service, or the dedicated community that supports and builds it, far from it in fact; it’s the diversity and quality of the games Indie Games Marketplace has to offer that makes Curling 2010 all the poorer in comparison. There’s no ingenuity to it, none of the spark or verve that sets so many Indie Games apart. It’s not cheap either, coming in at 240MSP.

Dadoo Games have created a soporific digital version of a sport that few of us have any interest in. It’s well put together, will almost certainly never break down but after half an hour you’ll have seen absolutely everything the title has to offer, and been bored by every single bit of it. Video games are supposed to be fun, rewarding, engrossing or at the very least enjoyable; Curling 2010 ticks none of these boxes. It doesn’t leave you wanting more, or cursing that the promise of a curling game hasn’t been fulfilled; it’s a dull simulation of a dull sport with little or no merit and no reason for existing save as a tech demo or CV piece. There are more than eight hundred titles on the Indie Games Marketplace; if you find yourself with a spare 240 points, roughly seven hundred of them are better than this waste of time.

Tags: Curling, Dadoo Games, ice, indie games, Xbox 360 Review, Xbox Live, XNA