Do you still suffer from Olympic fever? Are you constantly checking NBC looking for any glimpse of a balance beam, pool, or waving country flags? Fear not, Summer Athletics is here with your cure. Sure, you would think that an Olympic-styled game would just add fuel to the fire, but Summer Athletics is all but guaranteed to drown it, like Michael Phelps treats other Olympians' dreams.
If you remember the ancient Commodore 64 title, Summer Games, you know what to expect. The title is surprisingly similar, given the twenty-plus years between the two games. You have the option to play a single event, compete in a set of events (including a traditional decathlon), or build an athlete from scratch with career mode. The game gives you twenty-six events to play, in seven different categories. Save the lame career mode and a handful of additional events, it feels strikingly similar to the classic Commodore 64 title, except the older title actually plays better.
The career mode is the deepest of the modes, as it actually adds some RPG elements to the gameplay. After each event, the game gives you points to spend on training, in an effort to build your character's skills. This sounds great in theory, but the game puts no importance on your performance; choosing instead to provide you with one-hundred training points whether you win gold or finish last. In the end, building up a maxed-out character is as easy as playing through the terrible twelve-event career challenge repeatedly. To make matters worse, the events do not change, despite there being double the number of events available to you through the other two modes. Stranger yet, each character only has five attributes: speed, technique, power, jump power, and stamina.
More limiting, and potentially offensive, is the character creator for career mode. With a laughably limited set of options to choose from, you actually select your skin color by sliding degrees of severity for several different ethnicities. How anyone at the developer thought this was acceptable is a mystery. While the in-game animations look decent enough for a budget title, the game looks years behind the times graphically. The bare-bones presentation, complete with generic announcer in the background of the stadium, is lacking as well. Not only are there no Live options, there are no same-console multiplayer controls either. For a game based around competing against others, it is an unacceptable absence. Though they do have a decent number of countries represented, with a few notable absentees like Ireland, they seem to be listed in completely random order; making it tough to figure out if you zipped by your desired country too fast or if they just do not have it. Still, with all the issues with this sad, stripped-down excuse for a game, it would be passable with a decent control scheme.
Summer Athletics turns out to be a bad game with disastrous controls. The thumb-stick flicking sprinting controls are expected, but they completely mangle the controls of nearly every other event. High jump and diving events have annoying quick-time button-presses. They somewhat match the steps in high jump, but feel obnoxiously random in the diving. They tackle swimming with synchronized stick circles, where you are asked to keep pace with the on-screen meter that never feel rhythmic enough to work. They dumb-down cycling, where you would expect the circular stick movements, by just pressing up to accelerate and downward to slow down. In order to keep your stamina in line, you must constantly slow down to speed up, making the controls even stranger. The timing of the controls never feel as though they match up with what is happening on the screen, most notably in the pole vault; where you hit the 'jump' trigger several seconds before your character plants the pole.
Those looking to continue their Olympic high with this title will be sorely disappointed. You are better off dishing out the 400 MS Points for Track N Field, which is a much better value and game. This game feels like a true test as to the power achievement points hold on gamers, as the simple but time consuming thousand points are the sole reason some will seek this out. Avoid this one, as it is not even worth your time as a bargain bin rental.
