Winter Sports 2012
|
3DS
| Winter Sports 2012

With snow finally starting to envelop the UK this winter, it's only fair that we hunt for some quality snow-driven gaming to fill your time between throwing snowballs.

Winter Sports 2012 features a range of seven events, including the likes of downhill skiing and curling. It's also very, very white, as you'd expect.

While the game is relatively well-presented and provides a decent level of challenge for those looking for taxing gameplay on the 3DS, it also suffers from a severe lack of variety, horrid stereoscopic 3D effects, and some rubbish game design.

Snow push over

Winter Sports 2012 tackles numerous snow-based sports, sometimes enjoyably.

The Ice Speedway event, for example, is pretty well put-together, as you rev motorbikes around a track, shifting through corners and boosting along the straights.

There's a nice attention to detail, with bikers that look like they're actually gunning around the track against each other, and the controls are simple enough that a beginner can pick up the game and play perfectly well, but only someone with a bit more practice can master the drifts and boosts and grab all the gold medals.

It's all well presented, too, with visuals that aren't too shabby and a character-creation tool that, while simple, is enough to put your mark on the game.

A bit flake-y

Unfortunately, this is where the good points end and the cons start rolling in like a blizzard.

The majority of the other events are simply skiing down a hill in slightly different fashions - Downhill is going, well, downhill, while slalom is going through shorter gates, and Ski-cross is going downhill but slower. It's all very samey.

Even the ones that are a little different are a bit rubbish. Curling made us want to cry, and Ski-jumping is definitely not as fun as it sounds.

The game tries to make up for this lack of variety with cups and challenges. The cups simply group together events, and are dull. The challenges are a little more interesting, asking you to collect coins on a downhill run, or get specific distances in a jump, but really they don't add that much.

All downhill from here

It also doesn't help that Winter Sports 2012 has barely any personality whatsoever.

It may be well-presented, but many areas of the game are very amateurish in design - for example, tutorials are simply blocks of text in boxes that you need to scroll through in both directions.

Finally, the stereoscopic 3D effects are so bad that part way through a downhill race we were forced to flick the 3D slider down.

Winter Sports 2012 is an example of the kind of software that plagued the DS - shovelware.

Winter Sports 2012

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Mike Rose
Mike Rose
An expert in the indie games scene, Mike comes to Pocket Gamer as our handheld gaming correspondent. He is the author of 250 Indie Games You Must Play.