Galactic Bowling

For most of us, ten pin bowling is something to delay your group from getting drunk too early in the evening. On occasion, though, you find yourself in a lane next to a team that plays the game as if the world depended on it.

In Galactic Bowling, it does. There's a dark world out there in the corner of the galaxy on the verge of collapse. Its only hope of survival is to drain the life force from another more healthy planet. Its leader has chosen Earth, and your only hope of repelling his attacks is with a bowling ball.

Fortunately the tongue-in-cheek hilarity of this premise rolls, which is probably the saviour of this otherwise average bowling game.

As perplexing and irrelevant as it is, the backstory at least gives Galactic Bowling an excuse to come up with some wild environments in which to play. It gives the game just enough of a playful edge that, despite the seriousness of the competition, it remains fun.

The story also provides motivation to stick with the game given the lack of local multiplayer. Head-to-head play via local wi-fi or Bluetooth is absent, leaving you to save Earth solo or knock a few pins around for kicks in Quick Play mode.

Nevertheless, the screen is split in two like a two player game on a single device. Which essentially you are, although the other player is controlled by the CPU. The thought does occur that you don't necessarily need to see them bowl, but it does accentuates the head-to-head competition.

Even full screen, Galactic Bowling struggles to give you a good vantage point to bowl from, however, with your character standing right in front of you and the pins a long way down the lane.

It tries to clarify matters by making your player transparent during certain actions, but it’s hard not to find yourself vainly attempting to look over their shoulder as you throw.

You move your player left and right by swiping along the bottom of the screen, and you rotate using a similar vertical sensor bar along the right side. Throwing the ball is done using an unusual system that has you tapping a power meter repeatedly, then hitting your player before the power meter runs down again.

It works when throwing the ball at full pelt, but careful control is not something for which this system is built. Tilting the handset allows you to put some spin on the ball and curve it into the pins, which does add some nuance to the controls.

To spice things up a bit (and to keep the game consistent with its alien invasion premise) a bunch of power-ups and obstacles are thrown into the mix.

These can be momentum-sapping singularities in the middle of the lane or they can be used to put your opponent off or to perform a special move (which boil down to a free strike, for the most part). They don’t harm the game, but neither are they the extra dimension that is intended.

The fleshed out, comical characters and amount of affable backstory camouflage a plain bowling game, which isn't a bad thing. Most developers wouldn’t bother with the camouflage at all, so if it’s a choice between a basic bowling game and another one without an alien invasion fleet in orbit, Galactic Bowling would easily win out.