Review: PUMA After Hours Athletes

PUMA: After Hours Athletes is a Playstation Move-centric outing for the PS3, providing three motion-controlled nighttime ‘sports’ for the casual player.  In a market saturated by pick-up-an-play motion control games, the question is: “Does it stand up to the competition?”

Well the short answer is…no. After a few hours tooling around with this game I can safely say that the sales figures for Wii Sports or Kinect Sports have nothing to fear.

After Hours Athletes offers three games on the disc: Velocity Bowling, Hustle Kings (pool) and Top Darts. Each game supports Move controls, but there is also the option to control with a standardised controller.  A great deal of interaction is available as well, with customisable play areas, avatars, backgrounds and even darts that can be tweaked in appearance. However, each game is presented entirely separately from the others, with no easy way to switch between the different sports. The situation brings to minds the setup of Sony’s Classic HD titles such as the God of War Collection, where you are given a main title menu and each game then runs entirely solo. Similar to this PS2 remastered collection, you must quit the game ENTIRELY and re-boot it up to start playing a different sport, causing large delays that would not be conducive to a party-gaming environment.

Each game plays much as you would expect for the motions of the game involved, and yet still there is a sense of disconnect between the action you expect to perform and what the game actually requires of you. Let me make an example: When playing darts, the game asks you to hold the Move controller like a dart, hold the Move button down as you pull back with the dart, and then flick the dart forward while releasing the Move button. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, there is one major challenge; the average dartboard dart is less than half a centimetre thick, whilst a Move controller is about four centimetres wide at its thinnest point. Balancing this in your hand whilst holding down a button and ‘throwing’ it just does not feel like the activity at hand, but rather like trying to stab someone with  an oversized novelty pencil with as dainty a grip as your calloused gamer hands can manage.

On top of this, very little on-screen information is given as to the overall trajectory of your dart. More often than not I would I hadn’t ‘pulled back’ with the dart enough to meet the game’s high standards, and my only result would be making the aim reticule flail across the screen. The simple addition of a ‘throw power’ bar would negate this issue, similar to the ‘power gauge’ provided on similar motion title Wii Sports (yes, I’m going to keep calling back to this competing game. It shows motion gaming done right). By withholding this information I was left with less of a game of darts, and more a game of ‘will this throw work?’.

Setting aside questions of visual feedback, After Hours Athletes seems to have trouble maintaining its position as a Move title. I found that when booting up the pool minigame, Move controls were not even on by default. Despite the syncing of my Move controller on booting up the game, controls were set to use a PS3 controller by default, and I had to change them in the options before being able to waggle my way to the break.

In the game’s defense, the overall visual quality of the games is fairly high. Backgrounds around your play area are detailed and colourful, game elements like the darts and bowling balls are smooth and well-textured, and the background music is not soul-destroyingly repetitive. This isn’t enough to save the game itself, however. After spending some time in the world of After Hours Athleticism, the benefits sadly don’t outweigh the difficulties. To call back to Wii titles one more time, this game is less of a Wii Sports and more of a Wii Play – give it a try if you get it free with a controller or something, but try not to pay full price for it.