Sports Champions 2

What to say about Sports Champions 2?

Sports Champions is a collection of six mini-games and... that’s about it. Each game has its own championship mode, along with free-play and multiplayer variants. The selection of games is a bit baffling at first...

Wait! That’s what we wrote about the first Sports Champions two years ago. Who knew the world needed another basic swing-your-arms-a-bit motion-control sports game?

To make it worse these aren’t even new sports. Tennis? Bowling? Boxing? Is this Wii Sports? And archery? C’mon! The first game had archery and it’s essentially the same.

So what is different? Well I suppose tennis, bowling, and boxing are new; so are golf and skiing. At least for this game. But gamers have been playing these kinds of games for a while now, where’s the innovation? There have to be some other sports out there that you can mime in your lounge. Where are the cricket motion games? I actually miss frisbee golf (ps. game developers, I would totally play a game that was a mix of frisbee golf and Kinectimals where I train a cute puppy and then we play frisbee catch).

You can also create your own player and have them wear different clothes depending on the sport, or have them wear ski boots while playing tennis. Oddly I actually thought there were too many customisation options. Thankfully you don’t have to worry about that in party mode.

Party mode is where you can mix up your mini games for those nights when you’ve got a few friends around to play virtual sports. It should be mentioned that this does not feel like a game for kids. It doesn’t have the goofy easy feel of Wii Sports (the original) or the simplicity of Kinect Sports, so it’s hard to imagine that this is meant for kids to play. But how you could have a party mode and get rid of gladiator fighting, I don’t know.

The newest sport is skiing (the other sports are new to SC2, but not really new to motion games by any stretch of the imagination). Skiing would certainly be improved with two controllers (I would recommend that if you own or are thinking of buying a motion controlled system, that you buy two controllers). As you barrel down the slope you lean left or right to, well, lean left or right. There are also jumps on the way down and I’m pretty sure you can do flips (by raising or lowering the controller), but I could never pull it off.

The other sports, as you’d expect, play like those sports. Swing the racquet for tennis, or the club for golf, etc etc. There’s nothing too complicated here; again this is what you expect from a simple sports game. And I keep coming back to this, it’s a simple sports game, why would I get excited about it? Why would I pay $60 to play it? If I own the PS Move then there is a high chance I own the first Sports Champions and right now I can’t see any reason to upgrade.

The PlayStation Move is my favourite of the current motion capture game systems. It’s accurate, there’s no vague action like the Kinect or the Wii. So why do the game still feel like I just need to flail wildly with the controller to play the game? While there’s nothing technically wrong with the game, it just feels like there’s so much missed opportunity with Sports Champions 2.

"A remake of a game from 2010? That ain't retro."

5.0 Mediocre