The Sims Bowling

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, The Godfather Part 3, The Stone Roses Second Coming, the later episodes of Lost: regardless of the medium, maintaining the quality of a leading entertainment brand appears a near impossible job.

Games are no different. For every cracking game experience we've been offered in the name of Simsdom (i.e. Sim City and The Sims 2), others (such as Sims 2 Pets) were notably less sublime – and it is into that latter category that we must consign Sims Bowling.

Not that you'd necessarily leap to that conclusion at first glance – the presentation ably lives up to EA's slick standards. Having selected your alley avatar from a host of male and female forms, you then get to customise their appearance and even pick your preferred bowling hand. Once that's sorted, you're whisked off to a Sims Lounge and assigned an aspiration, which (apparently – see below) determines what motivates you as you play and effects the bonus items you can win.

Get out onto the lanes and things appear equally promising. The visuals are suitably shiny, with neat flourishes (such as the cartoon-ball and comment that flash up after particularly good or bad bowls, and action replays) and comprehensive controls that enable you to set starting position, aim, power and spin.

As soon as you unleash the ball, however, the cracks begin to show.

For starters, the ball's movement down the lane looks decidedly jittery on our handset, appearing to sedately skate rather than roll. Or at least that's how it appears until the view transfers to an above-pins camera, at which point the ball just hammers through at a thousand miles an hour regardless of how hard the throw.

Whilst this unconvincing behaviour is obviously annoying, it isn't half as problematic as what happens when the ball encounters the pins, which fall faster than England wickets in an Ashes test.

To illustrate the point, we scored no less than seven strikes in our very first game (and failed only once to pick up a spare scoring 213 – for the benefit of non-bowlers, the best score you could conceivably reach is 250). Second game out it was eight strikes and 228. The upshot is that you can't help feeling disappointed when a single pin remains, which is we feel something of a debilitating flaw.

Paradoxically, should you leave yourself an awkward split (two or more pins a distance from each other), the chances of knocking them down are slimmer than Posh Spice during lent. The problem is not so much that there isn't a physics model at work, rather that the physics of the pins are somewhat detached from the animations, leaving you with bizarre incidents such as pins spinning around on the ground and 'through' other pins without either dislodging or bouncing off them.

The latter problem seems less pronounced on higher-end handsets but it remains niggling, as does the discovery that the 'aspiration' concept is not the source of ultimate replayability but something of a smokescreen – 'popularity' being the only path you can follow rather than one of several routes through the game.

The bonus items rapidly feel slightly lacklustre, and with the lack of an organised competition (there's no league or cup set-up here) or even any particular hierarchy amongst your opponents, the best chance of extending appeal lies with the hotseat two-player pass-and-play mode. (Owners of higher end handsets can also enjoy the Spare-a-thon and Strike-a-thon challenges – simple twists in which you have to score as many strikes or spares in a row as possible – although both of these modes somehow missed our mid-range Nokia handset.)

Ultimately, The Sims Bowling isn't a complete gutter ball; doubtless completionist Sims addicts will be unable to resist adding it to their collection. But with so many better sims going spare (try Midnight Bowling, for starters), the rest of us would be best off up another alley.