Family Glide Hockey review

Games aren’t about bringing families together; they’re about blowing them apart. Daddy, Mommy, Billy and Sarah, the eerily perfect nuclear family at the heart of Family Table Tennis, and now Family Glide Hockey, understand this only too well. Ever since they discovered the joy of humiliating each other through competitive sport, they’ve been determined to strain their familial bonds via ruthless, cold-blooded competition. We can certainly relate to that.

We imagine the idea is that you and three of your relatives each pick a role and then battle each other, but if we wanted to beat our family to a pulp, air hockey wouldn’t be our game of choice. Glide may offer a fairly faithful interpretation, with some different tables and a few minigames to bolster the package, but anyone really interested in the ‘sport’ would be better off buying a hockey table instead. Half the fun lies in manhandling the mallet and puck, and that’s never going to be accurately represented on a console.

Still, Arc makes a good go of it. There are several control schemes – though none feel quite right – and even the option for mallet movement to be handled automatically, leaving you with little more to do than occasionally flick the remote to bash the puck. Even if you opt for full control, it’s a game that’s often more about dumb luck than true skill, and after half an hour you’ll have doubtless had enough.

Apr 14, 2009