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IGN Review of Biathlon
Drinking can be dangerous. Hit the sauce a little too hard and you start thinking really dumb things are in fact the greatest ideas in the history of man. Trying to fly off a roof using the services of the local toothless granny streetwalker and taking the most boring of the modes found in Winter Games and trying to turn them into a full game are great examples. I'm of course guessing here. There's a good chance that alcohol wasn't involved at either publisher Conspiracy Entertainment or developer 49Games. In fact, it was probably pot. Or acid. The bottom line is that mixing games development with being chemically altered is a bad thing.
Biathlon 2008 is a bad thing and if you pay money to play it, you're probably a bad person. If you get it as a gift from a loving-but-misguided relative, it was probably intentional. The only real use for the game is punishment for poor freelancers. Oh how I've been punished. Whatever I did wrong, I'm so very sorry for it.
What may surprise those of you who fancy reading reviews about games that nobody else will play is that I actually gave the "passable" score of 6.0 to Winter Sports: The Ultimate Challenge 2008. In truth, though the game was just a collection of mini-games, the execution of all but the cross-country skiing events were actually kind of fun. Puzzlingly, 49Games apparently thought that grafting some tepid shooting bits onto the stamina-driven cross-country events and burning the bastard offspring onto a disc would a good idea.
Well, it wasn't.
Let's start with that stamina system, which basically has you either tapping/holding X or using the right analog stick to keep the power within limits, otherwise your skier will start to get worn out. The maximum "output" of any moves changes depending on the terrain, so when going uphill, you can't really pour on the steam or you over-exert your little stiffly-animated licensed athlete, and in the most basic sense, the system works. Mash the button to raise the power and eventually the fatigue meter will crush back your power until you're wobbling along at a crawl.
As a result, you'll have to more or less constantly change output, backing off to ease fatigue and ramping up when you get to flat-out sections (where you can also choose to go all-out in little "sprints" that risk burning overall energy reserves. This little meter that determines overall stamina is effectively useless, however. I'm sure there's some difference in overall speed, but it sure wasn't anything I picked up on, so you can just go full-bore -- allowing of course for at least the immediate fatigue meter to die off before jumping back on the speed -- without any long-lasting effects.
This includes the aforementioned shooting bits, which occupy a pair of stops around the three laps of the 17 tracks in the game. You'll try to hit five smallish targets while prone, and then do it again with larger bulls-eyes while standing. Holding R1 will allow you to hold your breath and steady the aim, but even created characters with next to no stats can hit targets with zero effort. It echoes the greater issue of the whole RPG-lite elements not really making much of a difference. Maxed-out characters might be able to push harder for longer or kick on one of their hill climb/increased sprint/boosted stamina skills, but even on the hardest difficulty, the races are a complete cakewalk -- especially considering the actual shooting parts aren't any tougher.
©2008-04-25, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Biathlon 2008 is a bad thing and if you pay money to play it, you're probably a bad person. If you get it as a gift from a loving-but-misguided relative, it was probably intentional. The only real use for the game is punishment for poor freelancers. Oh how I've been punished. Whatever I did wrong, I'm so very sorry for it.
What may surprise those of you who fancy reading reviews about games that nobody else will play is that I actually gave the "passable" score of 6.0 to Winter Sports: The Ultimate Challenge 2008. In truth, though the game was just a collection of mini-games, the execution of all but the cross-country skiing events were actually kind of fun. Puzzlingly, 49Games apparently thought that grafting some tepid shooting bits onto the stamina-driven cross-country events and burning the bastard offspring onto a disc would a good idea.
Well, it wasn't.
Let's start with that stamina system, which basically has you either tapping/holding X or using the right analog stick to keep the power within limits, otherwise your skier will start to get worn out. The maximum "output" of any moves changes depending on the terrain, so when going uphill, you can't really pour on the steam or you over-exert your little stiffly-animated licensed athlete, and in the most basic sense, the system works. Mash the button to raise the power and eventually the fatigue meter will crush back your power until you're wobbling along at a crawl.
As a result, you'll have to more or less constantly change output, backing off to ease fatigue and ramping up when you get to flat-out sections (where you can also choose to go all-out in little "sprints" that risk burning overall energy reserves. This little meter that determines overall stamina is effectively useless, however. I'm sure there's some difference in overall speed, but it sure wasn't anything I picked up on, so you can just go full-bore -- allowing of course for at least the immediate fatigue meter to die off before jumping back on the speed -- without any long-lasting effects.
This includes the aforementioned shooting bits, which occupy a pair of stops around the three laps of the 17 tracks in the game. You'll try to hit five smallish targets while prone, and then do it again with larger bulls-eyes while standing. Holding R1 will allow you to hold your breath and steady the aim, but even created characters with next to no stats can hit targets with zero effort. It echoes the greater issue of the whole RPG-lite elements not really making much of a difference. Maxed-out characters might be able to push harder for longer or kick on one of their hill climb/increased sprint/boosted stamina skills, but even on the hardest difficulty, the races are a complete cakewalk -- especially considering the actual shooting parts aren't any tougher.
©2008-04-25, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved