Vancouver 2010 - The Official Game of the Olympic Winter Games for PlayStation 3 Reviews & Ratings by IGN

Why do you watch the Olympics (summer and winter) every two years? Some might say it's for the supreme athleticism on display, others might argue that it's the really tight clothing that all the participants wear. For me, it's all about the medal count. It's about me being able to stand up and say to my Portuguese, Russian and Ukrainian friends that the United States is better than the rest because we got 13 more gold medals. It's arbitrary, sure, but I'll be damned if it doesn't instill a sense of national pride you'd be hard pressed to match.



Sadly, Vancouver 2010 contains none of this emotion or pageantry. Instead it feels more like a set of Olympic events that players can hop in and out of at their whimsy. It presents a decent amount of fun; it's just not what an Olympic game should be.



Vancouver 2010 is a remarkably straightforward videogame. You press start at the main menu, select Olympic Games, Training or Challenges and then pick your event(s). When you hop into the Olympics you have the option to create a playlist of events or play them one at a time. With just 14 events represented, it shouldn't take you very long to work your way through them all. Each presents different gameplay mechanics, most of which do a good job of steering clear of the typical button-mashing that Olympic games from yesteryear devolved into. Sometimes you'll feather the triggers to maintain balance on a ski jump, other times you'll be moving both analog sticks to keep your bobsled on the proper line. Regardless of the event, the days of mashing buttons are largely gone.

Another cool gameplay decision is the advent of a first-person camera angle for every event in the game. By simply tapping B (circle on PS3) you can hop into your athlete's head and get a nice sense for how quickly things happen. During downhill skiing you'll hear their breath inside the helmet, the motion blur effect is ramped up and you'll even see a color filter put over the environment to fake looking through googles. It's really neat and does a lot to bring you into the action.



So the design of the events themselves is pretty cool. Each has varying means of delivering the sport to your controller, and almost all of them work well. Things like aerials and slalom can be a bit frustrating as the need for perfection is apparent there more than anywhere else, but you'll be able to stand atop the podium in most others before long. My real issue with Vancouver 2010 is that there's no soul behind any of your actions and no real point to anything you're doing beyond the few minutes that the event lasts. I see the potential of having an Olympics game with a career mode that imbues some sort of nationalism in players, but Vancouver 2010 has none of that. Not even close.



Instead you select a flag from a menu screen and play as a nameless avatar. There's no allegiance, no dedication, no connection to what's happening to them on the screen. It's a shame that these games still don't embrace what the Olympics are really about. Strange given the IOC's (International Olympic Committee) heavy involvement in each of these products.



Thankfully there is an online mode along with a fairly lengthy set of challenges that both do a good job of extending the life of Vancouver 2010. Challenges are separated across three mountains that vary in difficulty. You get an achievement (trophy on PS3) for each challenge and the goals are nicely varied from the standard "beat this time." The online gameplay allows for four players to join up and compete in a one-off event or a series of events. The cool thing (sort of) is that it's here that you'll find the only medal tally in the game. As you complete events and head back to the lobby, you'll see a ranking of medals for each of the players. It helps give meaning to each subsequent event.

The visuals in Vancouver 2010 do a good job of articulating the action but don't exactly impress in the long run. Player models are reasonably well-detailed and move naturally enough for the relatively limited number of animations. The first-person view does a good job of raising the bar set by other Olympic games and delivers a more thrilling way to play. The framerate stays consistent throughout, probably because the game never has to generate more than two minutes worth of gameplay and environments. Textures could be better given the limited architecture and geometry in any given level.



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