For almost as long as the modern video game console has been around, there have been games attempting to recreate the thrill and grandeur of athletics. We had some curious peripherals like the Power Pad for the NES trying to recreate the true feeling of running in a spot in your lounge room pretending you’re an olympic athlete, but most athletics based games were based around mashing buttons, alternating directions or keeping time. Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games shakes up this formula a tiny bit with some very Mario-like whimsical elements and in doing so tries to make an Olympic Games err… game more palatable for a wider audience. This does work, to a degree anyway.
The game begins at Copacabana Beach, where your Mii can walk around and enter single event modes. The beach serves as a hub world, essentially a menu where you will access all the different game modes, item stores and customisation options. After playing through enough of the Single Event modes to become acquainted, Tournament modes are unlocked and this is where the bulk of progress will be made from there. In tournament mode, you’ll be given a choice of three different events, some played in Elimination style tournaments, others in a Bracket style. As you play more and more events, you’ll gradually unlock coins and rings, each currencies that can be used to reshuffle available tournaments as well as to play a gachapon machine to unlock new music, clothing items for your Mii and stamps to use in Miiverse posts.
This is all just set dressing around the actual events however, and how much you enjoy the events will really determine how much you’ll enjoy Mario & Sonic 2016 as a whole. There is a wide range of events on offer. From the staple athletic button mashing 100m, relays and triple jump, to BMX riding and more complex team sports, there’s enough here that I suspect most people will find an event or two they enjoy. Traditional athletic events don’t amount to much more than rapid-fire button pressing and well timed taps but I personally did find a few standout events worth mentioning.
One of my favourite events was the Rhythmic Gymnastics. I had no idea how they would translate the graceful movement and intensely practised routines into video game form, but the solution seems obvious the moment you start playing. Rhythmic Gymnastics takes the form of a rhythm game. You only need to deal with a few different kinds of inputs. Notes fall down from the top of the screen, and you need to tap a button on either the left or right of the controller corresponding to the side the notes fell on. This is fairly simple to begin with but the game does play some devious tricks in higher difficulties to shake it up a little, as the left/right sides of the screen will move around making sure you don’t have as much time to anticipate which buttons to press. At certain points during songs you’ll need to respond to timed A and B pressed as well. It’s absolutely not complex compared to the Guitar Heroes and Hatsune Mikus of the world, but I still found myself replaying the few songs available for a chance at a better rating.
Team sports are another standout. You have Beach Volleyball, Rugby Sevens and Football (or Soccer depending on your persuasion). Like Rhythmic Gymnastics none of these will compare to dedicated games built around the sports but they’re still a decent bit of fun. More interesting though are the Duel modes. Each of the team sports has a Duel variation which takes a fairly basic interpretation of the sport and adds almost a Mario Kart flavour while upping the competitive stakes too. During these Duel matches you will be able to use items like shells and Moto Bugs to attack the opposing side. Each successful hit stuns an opponent and also builds up a Duel score for your side. This score keeps building up and up as a match progresses and then when a goal or spike lands the entire built up Duel score is added to that side’s actual score, while the other side loses the entire Duel score they had built up. This makes for some tense matches, as especially when a session goes for a while without either side actually scoring a huge Duel score can be built up by both sides which could mean an entire match being decided on the outcome of a single score.
A new addition to the Mario & Sonic Olympics this time around is Hero Showdown mode. You choose a side, Mario or Sonic, and are randomly assigned a team of 9 characters plus the captain. Winners of each round can use a special ability such as suspending a member of the other team or boosting the stats of some of their own team members. The captains of each side have perfect stats and so generally perform better than the other characters, and the objective of Hero Showdown is to knock out the other team’s captain. Usually you’ll knock out the nine other team members to force the other player to use their captain and make them vulnerable to being knocked out. A player can choose to use the captain early to get a statistical advantage but it’s a huge risk since if they lose that round they will lose the entire game. I didn’t find this game added a whole lot to the game. There’s a little bit of strategy in choosing abilities to use between rounds but really it’s just another wrapper around the same events.
This is probably my biggest issue with Mario & Sonic. While each of the events are engaging for a time individually, there’s not a great deal of depth to any of them. The game doesn’t do much to add more depth as you progress either. Every game mode is really just a different wrapper around the same basic shallow set of games. Whether it’s in a tournament setting, single match or Hero Showdown, the game overall just boils down to playing the variety of simple mini-games over and over. There is something to be said for making the game accessible, and it is likely their aim to make it accessible rather than giving people depth of mechanics to explore but in doing so it makes for a game unsuitable for someone looking for some depth to really dig into.
It’s a shame too, as there is some wonderful music hidden away in this game you won’t hear anywhere else. The soundtrack abounds with catchy remixes of existing Sonic and Mario tunes that will bring joy to fans of either series. While not awe inspiring, the characters and environments are well represented here too. Each character looks about as good as they reasonably could given their chosen visual style. In ten years this game is going to be a lot more palatable than any more realistic Olympic Games games.
Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games is a shallow game. It focuses on having a breadth of different activities which are fairly easy for any player to get to grips with and for this reason it works reasonably well as a multiplayer game. The lack of depth will mean it’s not likely to find a place in buddy game nights long term, but it is a bit of fun that can be shared for a while even with friends who might not be prepared to learn how to play more complex games. There’s not much here for the lone player to enjoy beyond pushing through gradually increasing difficulties of the same basic games, but it might work out to be an enjoyable night or two of multiplayer fun.
Rating: 3/5
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