Strike Force Bowling

Bowling fun for everyone

NA release: 6th May 2005
EU release: N/A
JP release: N/A
Developer: Lab Rats
Publisher: Crave Entertainment
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

Bowling must be a tricky activity to create a video game for. Do you go for realism and only attract people that care about how the oil on the lane can affect the ball, or do you go all whacky and crazy? Well, the real answer is “create really fun motion controls and include it in a collection of other sports”, but this game attempted to blend the two methods. In completely the wrong way.

The main gameplay is just a really dull boring sim. It’s been done many times before, and the various different modes don’t change the actual gameplay in any way. The “whacky and crazy” part is that you can have the lanes in various generically themed levels and unlock a robot and skeleton to join the four selectable human characters. The menus are all horribly clunky and nothing is fun at all.

It always baffles me how so few bowling video games embrace the fun animations that bowling alleys produce – such as performing strikes or when you have a tricky spare to make. It seems such an easy thing to do for a video game, yet all you get here is your character slowly nodding their head with the same animation for everyone.

Poor

The game is roughly the same on all three consoles, which makes you wonder why the GameCube version wasn’t released until almost a year after the other two. But regardless of that fact, in the end, Strike Force Bowling is a textbook example of a budget game. Its no-frills approach is inoffensive but also quite drab.
Jeff Gerstmann, GameSpot

Remake or remaster?

Nothing for this

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to buy Strike Force Bowling