In career mode, you can practice to get stat bumps or to unlock pro shop equipment, but if you want to take your bowler to the next level, climbing the league ladder is the only way to go. This is where the other major problem lies. Career mode consists of competing in various league night matches and tournaments. The league night matches are you against another bowler in a three match brawl, most of which take forever to complete, as you have to watch each and every one of your opponent’s shots. Thankfully you can save your progress after each of the three games, but even with that, a league night match can take upwards of 40 minutes, depending on how many strikes you or your opponent throws.
Whatever consistency problems you have, your opponent most certainly will not, until you pull ahead that is, and your nemesis, who, up until the 7th frame couldn’t hit a strike with a wrecking ball, magically transforms into the second coming of Earl Anthony. The AI in these league night matches can be brutal, with many come from behind victories as you crumple into a fatigued heap.
Once you enter a tournament, things get a little easier as you only have to play one game to best your rival and move forward, and the AI eases up considerably. The problem lies in the fact that winning the third tournament is necessary to move forward to the next league, and the third tournament, unlike the earlier tournaments, costs money to enter. If you’ve spent all your cash on equipment upgrades, you have to forfeit the tournament and it’s back to the beginning of the league with you. That’s right, you have to do all of the league matches and all of the tournaments all over again to get a shot at moving forward.
Certainly there’s nothing wrong with keeping a player from moving to the next tier if they can’t win the current tier, however if you’re going to make a player pay to enter a contest, you should provide them with the means of winning money in either practice, or one-off matches. As a result, it becomes a crushing grind of competing in matches, hoping that the line you developed in practice will actually work, and hoping that you can win the tournament so that you can move forward and practice a new line on a new pattern that won’t do anything in matches against even better bowlers. Whee.
It’s not a good practice to ding a game on what’s not included, however in the case of Brunswick Pro Bowling, there’s so much missing that could make the game better that it’s hard to not think of what could have been. With no PBA Tour pros to compete against, no PBA tour events to compete in and no tutorial mode to explain the different oil patterns, it seems like this game is but a shell of what a well done bowling sim could be. Ultimately though, it’s the lack of consistency in the bowling itself as well as the poorly designed career mode that places this ball firmly in the gutter.
