This is a fun curling game from the skip's perspective. Some straightforward technical improvements would earn it a fifth star.The gameplay loop consists of calling a shot (where to aim, how much weight to throw, which handle to give) and directing the sweeper to sweep for curl, line, or weight. Then your opponent does the same, and you repeat until each has thrown eight stones. The end is scored automatically and the next begins.The controls for weight and sweeping are mostly intuitive. There's an arrow overlaid on the ice - its length scales with weight, its location indicates point of aim, and one of two smaller arrows on the side is highlighted to show direction of curl. The only real problem is that when dragging the target around, it's possible to accidentally top one of the side arrows and switch the direction of curl - a sound effect to warn you've done so would go a long way to making that less frustrating. The camera mostly does a good job of showing what you need to see, except that the sweeping controls obscure the backline. The sweeping controls themselves lack a way to tell the sweeper to switch from one stone in motion to another, and defensive sweeping is not available (or at least, I couldn't discover how to do either of these things).Your thrower and sweeper have realistic human imperfections. The rock is typically thrown near where you directed, but not exactly, and the sweeper takes a second to do what you say, so it's not abstracted too far from reality. You get a second arrow superimposed on the first showing the shot they actually threw versus the one you called, which should inform your sweeping calls. My assessment is that your virtual team is a bit above rec league level in throwing the called weight and way better at sweeping, but remarkably poor at hitting the broom. This last point means that a hitting style of play is not really viable, because you stand a reasonable chance of missing completely (i.e. the stone misses by more than its own width), and you'll almost never hit precisely enough to make doubles. A finesse style works much better because it allows you to leverage your great sweeping to make up for poor aim, and I worked up to the top of the bot ladder this way. So far as I could tell, there are not distinct virtual players on your team, so every shot is affected by the same stats.The rules are mostly implemented correctly - the basic gameplay proceeds correctly, shots that don't cross the hogline or that touch the sidelines are instantly removed, and the free guard zone is enforced. However, the no-tick rule is not enforced, and stones that cross the backline are not removed as they should be, so it's possible to jam on a rock sitting just below the screen edge on what should've been a takeout. I was not able to test whether the game correctly handles a stone that touches another and ends up not fully across the hogline (it should remain in play), or whether it automatically enforces the FGZ (the non-offending team should have the option to leave the stones as they ended up). The ends and games also play to completion even when one team is mathematically eliminated, at which point that team should be obliged to concede. Burned rocks do not occur.The computer opponents have a variety of styles and skill levels. They aren't, however, one-dimensional - a finesse player will throw hits when the situation calls for it, for example. They all seem curiously averse to throwing guards but many will readily tick my centre guard to a corner guard if they have the hammer. Playing through them works according to a half-Elo system, where your rating goes up when you win and down when you lose, but the computer opponents' ratings are unchanged. Upsets cause bigger changes to your score, and ties (there are no extra ends) raise your score if the opponent was higher-rated than you and reduce it if his rating was lower than yours. You can challenge any opponent to any even number of ends between two and ten, inclusive. The default of four is great and takes about twenty minutes.Ice conditions are better than club ice. There is consistently about four feet of curl, and in a break from realism, no flaws - the stones curl equally left-to-right and right-to-left, and toward the centreline or away from it. It seems to me that the ice is a bit slower than real ice would be, but your throwing weight is adjusted correspondingly, so this mostly has the effect of speeding up the game by making any given shot spend less time in travel. I'm not a skip IRL and not particularly experienced at calling line - with that caveat, I found the stones to follow reasonable paths, breaking before the hogline and curling more and more as they slowed down. Likewise I couldn't tell if any stones had tendencies to curl more/less or run faster/slower, but I assume they do not.Some miscellaneous technical details - antialiasing would make this much better, as the steps in the background (you are playing in a hockey arena with empty seats) and the reflections on the rocks flicker annoyingly as the camera tilts to follow each shot. The rocks' noise is broadly realistic, with pitch and volume affected by speed (though sometimes pitch inexplicably rises at the end like an airplane taking off) but for some reason it is tied to notification volume rather than media volume. This app consumes some battery, but much less than a chess engine, so I consider it very acceptable considering that it's doing full-screen 3D rendering in real time. It's very responsive apart from the probably-intentional delay in the sweeper responding to your calls. The game ends without showing the final score, so in close games where the score of the final end is not obvious, you have to go back to the ladder to check your rating and see whether it went up or down to know whether you won.
Wow, thank you for the detailed and technical review. That's gold to steer development. I hope I can earn that 5th star...I'm happy to say that a couple things are already fixed: the no-tick rule is enforced and the final score and change to your rating is shown after the game. Most of the others will released the first week of March along with some other goodies.
