Summer Games 2

Have you always fancied standing atop the winner’s podium having a good old cry whilst the national anthem blared out? Are your memories of school sports days filled with the anguish of that devastating tumble in the three-legged race? Would you classify yourself as a pretty bloody competitive person?

If the answer of any of these questions is yes, then Summer Games 2 should be heading to your handset very soon. It doesn’t matter if you can’t even run to the shops these days without having a sit-down halfway, as here you get your chance to take on the best in the world (or your mates) and break world records without even breaking sweat!

Continuing in the increasingly fine tradition of the Playman series, Summer Games 2 packages four sporting challenges for you and up to five opponents (computer or mates) within an immediately loveable visual wrapping. You take charge of the diminutive redhead Playman as he tackles the 100 mete sprint, hammer throw, javelin and triple jump with the aim of winning a medal. Each of the events can be tackled individually or together within a tournament in which points from each event are combined. Manage to get the highest total score in this tournament and not only do you receive the coveted gold and see your name on the high score table, but you also unlock the next level of competition from regional to international.

Now four events might seem a little stingy in comparison to other sports titles (remember Hypersports?), but to be honest each event could almost have been released as a game in its own right, offering a distinct and progressively taxing challenge. The 100m is appropriately enough all about speed as you have to react quickly to the numbers appearing in random order on the left and right of screen, press the appropriate number quickly and your sprinter speeds up, get it wrong and he slows down. The pressure of the other runners creeping up on you adds a little extra tension, but it’s a nice simple challenge to start things off. The hammer by contrast is purely about timing, whilst the triple jump and javelin combine both systems to offer a sterner challenge and ensure that breaking world records is a genuine achievement.

By building simple controls into more complex combinations, the game proves incredibly easy to pick up but also offers a sustained challenge – especially when you come up against the international-level computer athletes. Of course the real long-term appeal here lies in multi-player challenges against human opponents and this is again handled brilliantly, working on a ‘pass-around’ basis on a single phone with players taking turns at throws, jumps and sprints as they seek to eke out an advantage in the race for the medals.

If we had to criticise, we’d say that it’d be good to be nice to customise the player’s visuals a little more and that there could be a little more variation in the challenge of the sprint and hammer, but this would be churlish in the extreme as this is a truly gold-medal performance.