You stand on top of the ramp surrounded by beautiful snow and scenery. You wait for the wind to pass and time your launch in that small window of opportunity. You can hear yourself breathe heavy. As the launch begins you can feel yourself accelerate at an increasing rate and hear the sound of your skis gushing through the snow. As you jump you wait for that last moment to land, a fine line that separates the gold medal from falling over. I am not actually talking about ski jumping in real life, but rather the Vancouver 2010 video game.

The gameplay is really well done and does a great job of giving the player a sense of speed and urgency. The sense of speed I have had with this game competes with the best of car racing games. The motion rumbling feedback while gushing in the snow and the beautiful graphics add to a great overall experience. Great gameplay and high resolution graphics for an Olympics game… I too was pleasantly surprised.

Besides the sense of speed the controls are also well done. Skiing feels distinct from snowboarding as the latter feels less stable yet has the potential for sharper corners. The third major format in the game are the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton. These are also well implemented as they require the players to tradeoff additional speed with increased risk of falling over and disqualifying completely. Most events are played one at a time on multiplayer, but one of the snowboarding and ski races can be played via 4 player split screen.

A Severe Lack of Depth:

Unfortunately however for a game based on Olympics, this does not have a lot of depth. There is no figure skating, hockey or curling. The former could have been implemented by sophisticated QTE similar to the rhythm games. The various types of competitions are all shared between skiing, snowboarding, skating and sledding.

It does not help that skiing and snowboarding although distinct are based on the same fundamentals and even share a same track. The bobsleigh, luge and skeleton not only share the same one track but also feel the same. The speed skating is one part of the game that is bad as it requires button mashing a single button. It doesn’t help that the game is very harsh on the required pace of button mashing.

Depth would not have been an issue if they had provided multiple tracks and maps but unfortunately this isn’t the case. Not only do some share the track but others are shorter versions of the original. I know the Olympics have a single track but for gaming purposes added tracks could have gone a long way.

The game is also lacking a career mode. Instead each event is played out individually. There are three sets of challenge modes. These offer alternate goals such as running into snowmen or recording speed. As this is a type of game that would succeed in a multiplayer setting, it’s a wonder why this was not implemented in multiplayer as well. The single player suffers from another major issue, it’s very hard. For races, winning a gold medal seems next to impossible. This carries on to the challenges as I got stuck midway through the intermediate set. The severe lack of depth means that this game won’t have your attention for more than four to five hours. Less if you aren’t playing multiplayer.

Final Word:

Although Vancouver 2010 does not have the depth we would expect in Fifa or Madden, the great gameplay and more than decent graphics actually make this a decent game and more importantly a step in the right direction.

For those feeling the Olympics 2010 fever would be recommended to check this game out as a weekend rental or wait for it to hit the bargain bin, which does not take long for these types of games.

Genre: Sports / Winter Olympics

Platforms: PS3, Xbox 360 (Reviewed on Xbox 360)

Developed by: Eurocom

Published by: SEGA