Apple Arcade review #31: Ultimate Rivals: The Rink

This arcade hockey game is basically unplayable with touch controls and I found it to be an incredibly frustrating experience overall. The action is so quick that you can’t take your eyes off the ball (or, you know, puck), but that means you’ll have a hard time hitting the tiny on-screen buttons. It’s marginally better on the iPad, but not by much.

On the Apple TV, with an Xbox controller, it sort of works. But the controls are not intuitive, and it’s not easy to understand what’s going on, where the puck is, who’s doing what. The game’s too busy being EXTREME.

I will admit that I’m not really in the target demographic for this game, although I do enjoy the occasional arcade sports game: I was a huge fan of the seminal EA NHL series on Sega Genesis/MegaDrive (back when they still had the brawling). But The Rink is a poor cousin to NHL. It’s flashy and loud, which gets in the way of actually playing the game, and the touch controls are simply not functional. I also experienced choppiness on the Apple TV 4K, but that seems par for the course with Arcade games: the device is just not able to keep up with the action.

Anyway, this is a “miss” for me.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/no/app/ultimate-rivals-the-rink/id1460840148