Action Bowling is one of the Daydream VR launch titles and as you correctly deducted from the name, it’s a bowling game that lets you put your motion controller to good use. Throw strikes and spares in VR and even put a spin on your throws while doing so.

Gameplay

When you start the game you are greeted with a selection screen that allows you to pick your bowling location as well as the bowling ball that you want to use. You can choose from 3 locations. A space station, a traditional bowling alley and an ancient Mayan tomb excavation site. And there is plenty of variety as what the ball designs are concerned, you will find your favorite.

Now you can choose to either play a round, look at your personal statistics or check out the leaderboards, but we will get to that later.

Choose Play and you are beamed to your location of choice. The game directly starts here because there is no multiplayer option whatsoever, this is a pure single player affair. You will get a short tutorial that will introduce you to the motion controls.

The controls are rather straight forward. First you choose the horizontal position on the bowling alley that you would like your throw to start. You do so with the touchpad. Then pointing the controller will determine the direction of the ball as indicated by the virtual hand’s position that is holding the ball. And finally you swing out and throw the ball, yanking your motion controller back and virtually throwing the balls as you would in real life. You can even put a spin on the ball if you would like to do so.

Even though the controls are simple and straight forward, it takes some getting used to it because they are not exactly intuitive. If you are an ace in the real bowling world it does not mean that you will hit it off in Action Bowling right away. That is because the final swinging out movement is not the main determinator of the direction of the ball, but rather in which direction the motion controller points before you do the swinging out movement is what counts. Here is were the weakness of the motion controller shows, which is not tracked in space like the Oculus, Vive or PSVR controller, but that would rather give the programmers some approximate data of what kind of motion had been tracked. Remember 2006 when we were first excited about the Wii controls but then rather quickly found out that the wiggling motions are glorified button presses only? 10 years later we are exactly there again, only in VR this time.

Once you do get used to the controls however, you will have no problems to enjoy your game of bowling and the game mechanics work rather well. It’s a real pitty though that it is only a single player game without any online options to play against other people. You cannot even play against a computer player. It is really only you on the lane. Even when you play in the traditional bowling alley environment, all the other lanes are empty. It does get quite lonely in Action Bowling.

Since it is a single player game, you would expect to at least find solid online leaderboards that would motivate you to play yet another game to finally beat that score. It seems like a major oversight that there are no online leaderboards to be found in Action Bowling whatsoever. Heck your scores don’t even get put on the local leaderboards that you can choose from the main menu. That would be bad even in Wii times and makes it look like the developer had to cut a lot of corners to get the game ready for the Daydream launch.

Presentation

The 3 bowling locations look good. It’s quite interesting to play in a space station or in an ancient Mayan excavation site. The traditional bowling alley looks good as well, but it does not quite feel like you are right at your favorite local bowling place because you are completely alone there. The bowling ball designs are creative and well done.

Immersion

Being completely alone on the traditional bowling alley does take away from the immersion. Same as the not really intuitive control scheme that reminds you throw for throw that you are not on the lane but rather playing a video game. You cannot hold the ball, wave it right in front of you, walk around before your throw, you are limited to what the game lets you do. It’s not immersive at all, it kind of shows that this has not been designed with VR in mind but is rather an existing game with tacked on motion controlls.

Comfort

Since there is no motion at all the level of comfort is high. There are absolutely no problems with comfort in Action Bowling.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately Action Bowling feels like a missed opportunity. While it’s fun to throw a few balls in the beginning, the game gets stale rather quickly. Especially the lack of any sort of multiplayer option and the missing online leaderboards are a major oversight. Together with the rather uninspired control scheme that feels like the motion controls were simply tacked on to an existing game, it’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend this title.

This could be fun or even great if the control scheme was improved to take the players swinging out movement more into the equation rather than simply mapping it for a glorified button press AND if you could meet your buddies in the virtual worlds for a game of multiplayer bowling. But at least there should be online leaderboards.