Because nobody has really come up with a dart-throwing mechanic that's both realistic and entertaining yet, darts is a difficult sport to re-create successfully in a video game. There are aspects of darts that plenty of developers have been getting right for years, however, such as the design of the board, the scoring system, and the number of darts that you get to throw whenever it's your turn. Indiagames, though, has seemingly gone out of its way to create a version of darts that is unfaithful to the sport in every conceivable way.
According to Indiagames, "The all-time popular pub sport of darts just got better" with the release of Darts-n-Dolls--which frankly makes us wonder quite what the company's definition of the word "better" is. On this occasion it means throwing 12 darts instead of three, always aiming at the bull's-eye on a geometrically unsound board that bears very little resemblance to an actual dartboard, having only 10 seconds to take each shot, and doing away with all notions of competition in favor of solo play. In other words, the sport of darts just got a lot, lot worse.
What's your incentive to play if you're not playing against anyone? A chance to stick your name on a high-score table, of course. That, and Indiagames' promise that "Every time you score a bull's-eye, you also get a chance to score with the dolls." Your chance to score with the titular dolls is in fact nothing more than an opportunity to look at one of a handful of low-resolution pictures of scantily clad females--none of which are worth the effort, even on the LG VX7000.
Not that hitting a bull's-eye takes a lot of effort, mind you. To throw each dart you simply attempt to stop both vertically and horizontally sliding bars as close to the center as possible before your 10 seconds runs out. It's actually a system that has been employed with some success in other darts games, but it's one that isn't nearly as challenging here, simply because you're aiming for the same area on the board with every single dart.
Darts-n-Dolls boasts three difficulty settings, imaginatively named easy, medium, and hard. Ramping up the difficulty makes the vertical and horizontal sliders move more quickly, and it dramatically increases the number of points that you score whenever you hit the board. Why the point values are higher on the more difficult settings isn't quite clear, since there are separate high-score tables for each setting, each with space for just one name.
Perhaps the best thing we can say about Darts-n-Dolls is that it features an option to turn the sound off. The game's music soundtrack is essentially an irritating ringtone, and the equally annoying beeping noises that your darts make when they hit the board are just plain wrong.
Darts-n-Dolls is about as much fun as you'd expect repeatedly stopping two sliders in the middle of horizontal and vertical bars to be; which is to say, not much.
