In this post, I review an ARKit game called Darts of Kings: AR Games. It’s a simple augmented reality darts game without the pro rules of the professional dart game. To be honest, one of my favorite non-AR casual games so far is called Darts of Fury. It’s also a darts game and I play it every day, but that games is very robust and follow the Darts Rules. In one of my previous reviews, I mentioned how amazing it would be to have a dart game in augmented reality, and I was excited when I found that a new Darts game was just released.
Darts of Kings is made by the same developer who developed the game AR Soccer Strike: ARKit Games. The developer changed the name of that title which was previously named AR Football – Reality Soccer, a game that I really liked and already reviewed here. Back then I didn’t understand why the called it like that, and it’s nice that they have changed it. It seems that they added the “AR Games” to the title to distinguish it from their other games and maybe so people will be able to locate it more quickly in the App Store or through Google (aka SEO).
Anyways, someone has tipped me about it on Facebook and I downloaded the game straight away. OK, so without further ado let’s move on for the review.
How you play Darts of King?
Darts of King is a very simplistic version of the popular Darts game It’s a single player game, with no competitive multiplayer mode. I’ve read the game’s description and the developer mentioned that more game modes are coming, until that happens, this what we have.
The target starts in a fixed position but will start moving after you hit it a few times, which makes it harder to hit obviously. You can play the game in either portrait or landscape mode, whatever you find fit. The game also shows you the distance to the target at the bottom of the screen.
In Darts of King, you need to aim a dart toward the target. A hit in the bullseye grants 7 points and other places 3 points. Your goal is to reach the highest score possible. The game features a global leaderboard where you can see how you stack up against other players from all around the world. As of the time of writing, I am the #1 player in the world, but also the only one in the global leaderboard, hopefully, you guys can try to beat me.
AR Experience and Fun Factor
Once you start the game, it will start scanning the environment for a location to play the darts board. The game doesn’t need a lot of space and a small table will suffice. I tried deploying it on the window’s porch buy without success, it was probably too small for it.
Let’s take a look at a gameplay video before moving on.
Once you have the target in place, you can then position it by aiming your iPhone or iPad’s camera to finalize the location. All went smoothly without issues.
I really wanted to love the game, but the whole games felt rushed and the entire gameplay experience felt really mediocre at best. The arrow was jittering on the screen all the time, small movements, but it felt really annoying. The right slide control looks like a UI slider from a website, it felt odd to use and it’s actually very unnecessary in my opinion. Just in comparison, in Darts of Fury you just swipe up on the screen to release the dart and it works really well. Having an iPad, I cant understand that it’s easier to have the control on the right side because you need both hands to hold the tablet. However, you can make the swipe-up gesture is detectable throughout the screen. If I needed to design it, I would make a very short intro that shows the gesture and that’s it.
It feels really disconnected from the real hand movement that you need to slide the slider down and release your finger to release a shot. The movement should be a swipe up gesture so the dart goes in the same direction of the swipe-up gesture, forward.
In this game, the further you slide down, the more powerful the release of the dart is.
Other issues that I had. For example, when the dart hits the target it just disappeared, you don’t get to see it stick into the board. The sound effects are also quite bad and I was really not immersed in the game at all.
Furthermore, there are no special effects, there is a crying and sad smiley face at the end for no reason. I mean, I will finish shooting all my darts in some way or another, why a sad smiley face at the end all the time? Did I do something wrong? Maybe I missed something.
The thing is that their previous Soccer game also had weird physics for the ball, but in that game, it was actually fun because it had some difficulty and there were characters who can block the ball. I would have preferred more fine-tuned and realistic physics to be honest, but I did enjoy their soccer game nonetheless.
The whole dart-throwing experience was really awkward and felt wrong. This game reminded me of another game called ARchery, a ‘bow and arrow’ target-shooting AR game. I really wanted it to play good and enjoy it, but it was designed really poorly and felt so unintuitive to play, same goes to this game that I am reviewing now.
As I mentioned, the whole experience felt rushed. I wanted to enjoy Darts of King: AR Games and was excited about it even more after reading that it’s from the same developer as AR Soccer Strike: ARKit Games. I don’t know what went wrong here. In the other game, they added nice graphics and sound effects and the presentation of the game was good. Here you only have an arrow and target, I’m sure the developer can put on a better presentation, make the arrow stick to the board (at least for two seconds after, in the game’s screenshot on the App Store it is like that, iPad bug?!), have more authentic sound effects, make some special effects to make me feel good after hitting the bullseye? Why is the target not completely rounded with sharp edges (add some more polygons make it looks rounded, I’m sure the processor of the ARKIt-compatible devices can handle it), why the UI is so small and looks so blend and not interesting?—so many things that could have done to make the game look and feel more fun to play.
The core gameplay is fun in augmented reality, but not with that poor presentation and gameplay mechanics. I say it sadly because I was hoping for more, much more.
I am disappointed as you can see. As of the time being, I just can’t recommend this game. I didn’t come across any other Augmented Reality (AR) darts games and I think this is the only one for ARKit out there. If you want to play darts in AR, you can download the game (it’s free) and try it out, but as I said, as in its current version (October 26, 2017), I do not recommend it.
I’ve reviewed the game using my iPad 9.7-inch 2017.