Curlington HD: Putting the cool into curling

Our rating:

By: Tore Hansen

Version #: 1.0

Date Released:

Developer: By Operatio

Price: $0.99

User Rating:

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Curling is one of those games that, to my mind, only old folks play, as it’s related to other exciting sports such as bowls and that ol’ cruise favorite: shuffleboard! So how could Curlington, a new HD app for ipad, possibly get exciting? Well, let’s start by blowing stuff up!

If you rewatch old episodes of the BBC car series Top Gear, it’s actually quite dull. Droning on about cars got a lot more fun once they started blowing stuff up and crashing cars every episode. This seems to be a lesson well learned by the development team behind Curlington: it’s curling, with all the trimmings, but also includes a lot of icing on the cake. Such as curling stones (or “rocks”) that explode and others that can fly off the curling sheet and crash spectacularly.

You have four teams to choose from, and three different arenas to test your mettle. Each team has their own specialty stone, for instance a curling rock that blows up, and one that can fly over any obstacles. Not everything seems to be finished completely: for instance, when I managed to win the golden stone (a very proud moment) I couldn’t get it out of its box. Now where’s the fun in that? And it also refused to resume the game so I had to start all over, without my bonus points. Or my golden rock. However, when I started playing I wasn’t expecting to get all excited about curling. But woohaa, I really got into it! There’s a lot of tactics and precision going on, I actually believe that real curling aficionados will have a blast with this, as it’s tricky, but not overly so. You can score bonus points and get cool extra stuff, like extra swerves. It looks great, the controls are pretty idiot proof, gameplay is smooth and they have managed to do the unthinkable: they actually made curling cool.

UPDATE: Tore told us that the version 1.2 is coming soon with a lot more features. Here are some screenshots:

We rate this app 4 out of 5 stars.