Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games

Genre: Sports (Various) / Minigame Collection

Players: 1-4 Competitive / Team Competitive (Local Wireless), Download Play Supported

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Review:

Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2012 (after a different game with the same name released on the Wii un 2011), is a Summer-Olympics-themed Minigame Collection that presents players with extremely simple minigames based on a wide variety of Olympic sports.

To be clear here, by “simple”, I mean “most of these will be over in 10-20 seconds” simple. These are minigames that are closer to WarioWare-style Microgames in their simplicity than they are to Mario Party-style minigames. So when you see a massive list of nearly 60 sports represented in this game, it helps to keep that in context of how short and simple the versions of these sports are in this game.

Sports are separated into 11 different categories, though these categories have little bearing on the type of gameplay within the minigames in question. There’s athletics (events where you run and throw things, Aquatics (water events not involving boats), Court & Field Sports (more traditional competitive sports like Tennis and Volleyball), Contact Sports (Judo, Boxing, etc.), Gymnastics, Cycling, Equestrian (making horses jump things), Boat Games, Shooting (with guns or bows), Weightlifting, and Multi-Discipline (Triathlon and Modern Pentathlon). Players wanting to test out each minigame can even go into these categories to play any of the individual sports within that category.

It bears mention that even sports that seem like they should play similarly often don’t – 100m has players timing the release of a button at the start of the race and then tapping quickly to run, while 1500m has players rapidly tapping buttons and moving their character left and right with controls that are constantly changing. Other sports focus on only one element of the sport in question – Marathon, for example, is entirely focused on picking up bottles of water, while Volleyball and Badminton don’t have you moving or aiming, but instead only timing your button presses.

It’s not a terrible idea for an Olympics game to go simple and abstract like this – after all, there are so many Olympic sports that trying to represent a decent portion of them will inevitably lead to a “Jack of all trades, master of none” sorta’ situation, and even if you absolutely nail the gameplay in one of them it will inevitably be so content-poor that it’ll still be underwhelming (see Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games on Wii U). Perhaps heading completely in the other direction is the smart way to go – if you need to simplify everything, over-simplify and make it into a fast-paced minigame rush.

The problem with that is, Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games is not fast-paced. Rather than designing these minigames in a way that makes them naturally intuitive, before each minigame it takes a moment to tell the players the controls for the game, ensuring that there’s a long pause between different minigames. Making things worse is that this game vacillates between minigames that use the traditional gamepad controls, and games meant to be played using the stylus, which means that throughout one game session, you’ll often find yourself pulling out and putting back the stylus multiple times.

This game also makes some odd creative choices throughout – there’s a story mode, because someone thought we’d all enjoy a story about the Mario and Sonic characters competing in sports to counter a plot by Bowser and Robotnik to… cover London in Fog? Additionally, players are limited in what characters they can play based on the event they choose. Want to play the whole game as Mario or Sonic? Well, too bad, this is a hurdles event, so you can only choose Yoshi, Bowser Jr., Shadow, or Silver. It’s an odd choice that is sure to disappoint fans of these characters… which is to say, anyone who wanted to buy this game.

At the very least, the presentation here is quite good, with polished 3D characters and backgrounds, with good animation, a decent amount of detail, and energetic music that fits the game well enough.

However, Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games can’t help but seem like a game with good ideas ruined by questionable choices in the execution of those ideas. A WarioWare-style Olympics game sounds great… but then slowing it down to a crawl and constantly forcing players to change their control scheme is decidedly not-so-great. The presentation is good… but then they push a story no one asked for and keep you from playing your favorite character in a sport you like? In the end, there’s some fun to be had in this game, but mostly it fails to hit the mark.

tl;dr – Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games is a Summer Olympics-themed Minigame Collection, with simple minigames often based on only a part of the sports in question. It’s actually a pretty good direction to go with Olympics games, but it is undone by the game’s ponderously-slow pacing, constantly-shifting controls, and poor creative choices. This isn’t a terrible Minigame Collection, but it is a deeply-flawed one.

Grade: C-

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