Summer Athletics: The Ultimate Challenge (Wii)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 1.5 stars Poor
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 3.0 (1.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Carolyn Petit
• Reviewed on: 09/10/2008
• Released on: 08/04/2008
• Originally published on GameSpot: Summer Athletics: The Ultimate Challenge (Wii) Review

Imagine, if you will, an international goodwill competition consisting of eight athletes coming together in some city or other to test their abilities in a series of dull takes on traditional sporting events while the eyes of the world look elsewhere. Summer Athletics: The Ultimate Challenge brings this vision to life, and it's every bit as underwhelming as you'd expect.

Summer Athletics is a collection of seven simple minigames based on seven categories of events: running, jumping, swimming, throwing, cycling, archery, and high diving. Although there are a number of events within each category--the jumping category contains pole vault, long jump, triple jump, and high jump events, for instance--the differences in how the events in a category play out are relatively minor. You can jump right into any individual event or play through a prearranged or custom competition made up of any combination of events, with up to four players participating. The game also includes a career mode in which you create your own superathlete and take him or her through a series of competitions. There are a surprising number of options for customizing your athlete's appearance, but none of them have a significant effect. No matter how much you tinker with these options, your athlete will still end up looking like a plastic doll made from the same mold as all the other athletes in the game. Summer Athletics pretends at depth by making you spend points after each event to improve your athlete's attributes in career mode, but this just feels like busywork, because it's never clear what effect these attributes have on your performance.

There are more competition options here than you can shake a javelin at, but they can only be as good as the minigames they're composed of, and the minigames in Summer Athletics range from mediocre to awful. The diving events are just simple rhythm games. Your dive takes place in slow motion, and you have to respond to a series of visual cues with precise timing to execute the best possible dive. It's nothing remotely exciting, but at least it's clear what you have to do to succeed.

The same can be said of events like short-distance running, which just involves jiggling the right stick back and forth as fast as you can on the 360 and moving the Wii Remote and Nunchuk up and down rapidly on the Wii. There's no depth to it, but there's still a certain straightforward appeal to these kinds of brief endurance events that's reminiscent of classic sports games like Track & Field. The throwing events and jumping events are pretty similar to each other, and all involve building up momentum with rapid controller inputs and then timing your jump or throw for the best possible result. Like the short-distance running events, these feel a lot like sports games of old that put an emphasis on rapid button mashing. That gameplay mechanic still works in short bursts, but it is decades old, and this game does nothing to improve upon it.

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