Activision - Winter Sports 2008 review
wax your skis and polish your skates
Review date: 14 March, 2008. Review by: Darren Allan
Like snowball fighting and snowman construction (with extra marks for the most imaginatively-placed carrot). And forget bobsleigh; this title contains some real winter sledding action, with the choice of a tea tray or bin bag to sled on, and a fence, bush or river at the bottom of a seventy-degree slope to crash into.
Well OK, maybe not. In fact, Winter Sports 2008 keeps most of the same events from the 2006 incarnation. There are two types of skiiing (downhill and slalom), three bobsleigh-style events (the bob itself, luge and skeleton), ski jumping, speed skating and cross-country skiing. The biathlon has been dropped, which is a shame as it was one of our favourites.
Two new events have been added, but before evaluating them, let's look at the tweaks implemented to the existing ones. Skiing, ski jump and cross-country remain pretty much the same; it's the bobsleigh events and speed skating that have been altered for the better.
Bobsleigh now gives the player much more feedback on whether they're steering correctly. There's an ideal racing line drawn on the track, along with an audible tone when you're following it perfectly, as well as an indicator to show how fast you're going through turns. Whereas before you were just hopelessly guessing at how much to steer through a bend, now you can judge much better, which makes for a marked improvement in the three sled events.
Speed skating was the other discipline that suffered from an annoyingly tricky control scheme based on rhythmic key presses. This rhythm was extremely difficult to maintain, but that problem has been smoothed over in Winter Sports 2008. It's more forgiving now, although there's still an art to getting a good time; another positive change.
The two new events are figure skating and curling. The former is a simple timing game, so hit the right keys at the right time and you perform a spectacular triple lutz. Miss too many key presses and it becomes a triple klutz (usually involving your skater falling on her backside).
The curling event is kept pretty streamlined too, with a basic power bar, direction and spin to set for each shot. It has more depth than the average discipline, given the tactical shot planning necessary, although the spin mechanic is rather unsatisfactory and difficult to judge. Nonetheless, these two events are reasonable additions to the Winter Sports formula.
Bigger changes have been made on the options front with the inclusion of a campaign and career mode. The campaign comprises a variety of challenges, such as dodging skulls littered on the bobsleigh course or performing a perfect start in skiiing. There's an interesting mix of these and they're useful for practicing specific parts of the different events.
The career mode presents four leagues that you've got to work your way up by winning tournaments. Each victory grants experience points to spend on improving your athlete, and although it's a fairly simplistic system, this adds an extra dimension to Winter Sports 2008.
Many of Torino 2006's faults have been corrected here. There are still issues with the events being overly similar, some rather flat presentation and the odd glaring bug here and there - we fell over three times in one ice skating routine and were awarded perfect marks - but this is definitely an improvement for the series.
Verdict
Winter Sports isn't the perfect snowflake, but the added career and campaign modes give the franchise some much needed depth. The extra events are solid, the tweaks to the existing ones are well thought out, and at a near budget price this is a worthy purchase.
Company: Activision
