There’s a lot more to ten-pin bowling than meets the eye. What to most people is something you do while half-cut during a boozy night-out or take your kids to for a birthday hides a chilling secret: it’s actually a very complex sport. Video games have generally treated bowling as the former, though – that’s why the greatest-ever bowling game is one that is played with extremely broad motion controls and requires gleefully little thought.
Better can and has existed, though. This year, better gets an upgrade in the form of PBA Pro Bowling 2026, which as the title suggests is the officially-licensed video game of the Professional Bowlers Association. In terms of ambition, this game wants to be to bowling as EA and 2K’s efforts are to golf. Working with what is obviously a much smaller budget because the sport has a much smaller target audience, I’m actually quite impressed by what the game has to offer.
Now, I don’t think that you need to actually have a fulsome knowledge of the internal mechanics of a sport to review a simulation of that sport, but I’d argue that it helps. So it is here that I must briefly confess that despite being in my mid-thirties, I frequently have the hobbies of a pensioner. I have been ten-pin bowling since I was about twelve, picking up the hobby from my grandfather – we’d compete in doubles leagues – and then carrying on long after he was no longer able to play. I still bowl in a private league with my mates every year once the weather turns cold and golf becomes inhospitable – and though my best-ever average (192, for what it’s worth) now eludes me, I’d describe myself as still pretty good with a decent knowledge of the game’s mechanics. There’s currently seven different bowling balls stacked on shelves in my garage. My wife is a patient woman.
I honestly think the above – laying out my credentials – is all pretty important to this discussion. Plus, it’s Christmas, so sod it, I’m into this, I’m writing about it. Anyway – if you look at PBA Bowling 2026 from a few steps back, I’d say what you’ll get out of it is a sports game that somewhat looks and feels like it dropped out of a past era – something that might’ve shipped in the 360/PS3/Wii era, when things like pro darts and bowling were getting games more regularly.
There’s some character models of the world’s most famous pro bowlers that have that proper 360-generation uncanny valley going on, for sure. There’s a ropey but ambitious character creator, and some astonishingly cheap-looking menus. But, honestly, none of that really matters: it’s what’s under the hood that drives the game. If you know the mechanics of the sport and understand what you’re looking at, what’s under the hood is immediately impressive for a game of this size.
In this sense, I can say that PBA Pro Bowling 2026 isn’t suffering the same problem as actual bowling, where dubious corporations buy out bowling centres, fill them full of disco lights, ticket redemption arcade games, and karaoke booths – all style – but then allow the actual bowling lanes to go to rack and ruin. No substance. PBA Pro Bowling 2026 is the opposite, in video game form. It isn’t the most stylish thing – but it is substantive.
If you don’t know about the ins-and-outs of bowling, well… it’s more than just a load of balls. There are a load of balls, obviously – the game’s pro shop has over a hundred, each with their own unique look, style, and properties. The ball material, its weight, the surface finish, the shape of the core inside of it – all of these things have an impact on the ball physics in real life, and therefore do also in the game’s simulation. I was quite impressed that I was able to find all but one of the balls in my current real-life arsenal in-game, and found that they all broadly performed exactly as I’d expect them to from my real life experience.
Away from the realm of balls, though, there’s more. Bowling lanes are lined with oil, in recognisable patterns, where the oil on certain areas of the lane will be thicker than in others, and then eventually peter out entirely. In pro bowling, oil patterns are literally named – so a pro will know the difference between a ‘Badger’ and a ‘Scorpion’, or what have you. The lay of the oil impacts how the ball travels down the lane, most prominently on the ‘breakpoint’ – the spot down-lane where the ball transitions from skating on the oil to spending its traction on bare wood to hook. That’s how pro bowlers get those crazy hooking and spinning balls – they know what they’re looking at.
But there’s more to it than that! Oil is obviously not permanent, so as you bowl the balls will physically move the oil around the lane – the pattern which was pristine on frame one will ‘break down’ over the course of games. In a three-game series, the lane might be a total difficult pig with nightmarish ball control by the third game.
All of this is simulated to an alarmingly good degree in this latest PBA title, which boasts a new engine over the previous edition, which shipped four years ago. You can of course press a button here and do something impossible in real life – visualise the position of the oil as it shifts in a heatmap down-lane. Fold in an overhauled pin physics simulation too (this seems a touch lively, if you ask me) and what you have is a painstakingly realistic-feeling title. “This is no arcade game”, PBA 2026’s Steam listing states. And that much is true. If Wii Sports is Mario Kart, then yes, this is Assetto Corsa. On a shoestring.
The simulation is deep, but the relative simplicity of the sport is represented in simple back-and-forth stick controls for bowling approach, swing, and spin – much like the up-and-down control you see in a lot of golf games. It works well. Finding the right ‘line’ and then racking up a bunch of easy strikes doesn’t feel as satisfying here as doing it in real life, sure – but it definitely evokes that moment.
That simulation is the core of the package, but obviously there’s a good amount of ways in which that setup is then used. There’s quick play features, online play, a career mode, and a surprising amount of twists on the sport available.
I imagine most people will spend the lion’s share of their time in the career mode. This is delightful in its stripped-back simplicity. From a very basic menu you select matches across ‘tiers’. The first tier is your local leagues in your created character’s home town; as you advance through the tiers, you’re eventually playing the pros on the national stage. (Yes, the “Who do you think you are, I am?!” bloke is in the game.) Between matches you unlock new tiers of gear – clothing and balls – and can gradually build out your look and load-out with the cash you earn.
The matches you’ll be selecting from across the career aren’t just basic bowling matches, either. There’s one-on-ones, team-based matchups, and ‘ladder’ tournaments. Once you get sponsored by one of the brands, you’ll represent that brand in ‘Battle of the Brands’ events. All of these things are staples of the real-life PBA tour.
There are some zanier things, of course. I love a Strike Derby – a format that is about speed and skill. In two minutes you have to score as many strikes as possible. If your rack gets headed with a golden pin, which happens at random, a strike is worth two. That’s in. There are spare pickup challenges, where you face off against another pro attempting to nail spares that gradually increase in difficulty, right up to the famed 7-10. And there’s duck-pin and candlepin/stick bowling, offering a totally different distraction to the main sport.
The career mode does its best to lightly teach you the core concepts of bowling – but it also seems to be quite knowing that its core audience is probably people who have at least a basic handle on its concepts, if not from playing then from watching televised competition. The career mode is also forgiving in that it doesn’t have an ever-marching calendar. It’s an escalating series of challenges arranged across an expanding map of the US – so if you fail an event, you can simply keep trying until you nail it.
The simulation combines with the ambition, for me, to just make something very loveable. They didn’t really need to make thirteen different venues, some of which are 1:1 recreations of real life centres, but they did. Other times, shortcomings frustrate. Some of my favourite pros are women, and you can create a woman for career mode – but not a single famed female bowler is represented in the game’s 32-strong roster of pros.
The commentary is great, until you realise just how repetitive it can be, and find it lacks the nuance of real-life. These commentators know the result the second the ball leaves your digital hand, so there’s none of the eager reaction to an unusual pinfall or what have you. Bowling commentary has a reputation for being gloriously memeable, but that doesn’t really exist here. The same is true of the crowds, who cycle through the same “Whoaaaa…!” noise of excitement as the ball slams into the pocket way too much. Again, I’m reminded a bit of older sports games of past generations here – but to be fair, there’s no EAFC, Madden, or even MLB-level funding here. What is here works – and there’s plenty of room for future entries to improve.
Being honest, it does all feel quite cheap and of a bygone era. But it’s also earnest and lovely. One also has to be realistic – this is a video game simulation of a sport that is in and of itself struggling, with leagues shrinking and centres forgoing regular custom to chase once-a-year visitors who buy a lot of drinks. Thereby this game’s audience is limited, and so its budget must also be limited. I think what has been accomplished with that budget is quite impressive – and certainly full of a glowing love for this unique little sport.
PBA Pro Bowling 2026 is out now on Steam, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. A Switch version is coming in January.
