Decca Sports Curling - A Review

[silimili]

Altogether very impressive and enjoyable! It's pretty easy to master the throwing stroke, though the flick of the wrist needed to get curl was a bit hard to grasp at first. Sweeping is fun, just waggling your remote back and forth at the sensor, though die-hard curlers will most likely default to shaking it like a broomstick (guilty as charged).

There are a few things Decca did badly though:

• The ease of throwing straight shots, even at low weights. (In real curling you can't get a stone to go perfectly straight unless you throw it so fast your sweepers are sprinting down the ice after it.) This makes tapping your guard, high or low, straight back into the other team's shot rock one of the easiest shots to make. Not so true in real life, but it made me feel like a bona fide Olympic curler so it's good for morale I guess. :-)
  
• The weight sensor. That little red bar oscillates up and down so fast it's hard at times to release at the right weight. This can make or break an end, unfortunately.
  
• Be careful which teams you pick. The "tiny" people cannot throw hack weight, which cripples your strategy. Sometimes you want nothing more than to tap someone out, only to promote them into shot position. You can tell the difference between their ability because the red weight sensor has a greater range when it oscillates for the "big" players than for the "tiny" ones. From now on I will only be using the teams populated entirely with "big" players.
  
• The AI seems to get confused when you have several rocks in the front of the 4-foot and a few guards up in front of them. Instead of attempting to draw around (even when there are rocks off to the side to hit & roll off of) it just throws stuff straight up the center line, and the shots predictably crash into the guards. One end I got promoted from 2 to 3 points because the AI's last shot promoted one of my guards forward. For the record, I only tried this on the middle difficulty setting. Perhaps this flaw is corrected in the highest setting.
  

All in all, an awesome game I will be spending many nights playing. Wii!