Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games
Rating: E
Score: 5.0/10
Oh boy! What’s better than having the two biggest video game mascots together in one game? Oh wait, it’s like we’ve been through this before...deja vu.. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, two years back. It’s the same deal here, two huge franchises (Mario and Sonic, obviously) competing at the Olympics, the Winter Olympics. This game is only available on the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS.
Both series brought their heavy hitters again, but added four new characters. That’s it, just four new ones? Yes, because anything more would be too generous, of course! Anyways, the Mario side includes: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Bowser, Wario, and Bowser Jr.. The Sonic side includes: Sonic, Shadow, Amy, Eggman, Metal Sonic, and Silver. Each character has his or her own stats. For example: Sonic is extremely fast but quite weak, while Mario, in comparison, is balanced all around. Likewise, each plays a little differently than the other.
The courses are fun, at least the first few times. After a while, these courses start to become stale, and much too repetitive. The only possible exception is the “dream events”, the crazy, only-slightly-realistic events which play a lot like Mario Kart. You race your opponents to the goal, running over question mark blocks and gaining items to help you and/or hinder your opponents. In the long run, you might as well just play normal Mario Kart over this cheap knock-off, unless you’re a huge Sonic fan.
Like its predecessor, the multiplayer is solid. It’s pretty fun if you have the right events, otherwise you’re just boring another friend. I guess it’d be better to be bored with a friend, despite the fact that you’d be missing the point of “playing for fun”.
As you probably could gather, this game is extremely similar to its predecessor overall. Considering its predecessor left...room to improve, it’s not a good thing that this is so similar. The events in it are better quality, but there are less unique events so more repetition ensues.
There’s little else to say, really. It’s such a short, shallow game it makes it hard to say much about it. It’s a lot like its predecessor in a negative way, making it seem like a winter version of the first game rather than its own game. A fun fact is this is the first Winter Olympic Games video game, but, sadly, just a mediocre one.