Summer Athletics: The Ultimate Challenge

Summer Athletics gets off to a good start with a generally competent control system. It's a shame that its lack of features means that it can't quite go the distance, and ultimately ends up coughing, wheezing and spluttering after just four or five hours of gameplay.

The difficulty of events varies wildly and it’s hard to accept that inconsistency, but if you absolutely must know if you can ‘virtually’ run faster than your mates it can prove a reasonable diversion, and a fair way of spending a few summer evenings slumped on the couch.

Summer Athletics doesn't have a lot going for it. Some of the events can be fun on some level, but there are better competition games on the market. It also has some pretty big presentation issues, which is unfortunate.

The quality and overall consistency is better than Beijing 2008, although it lacks visual flair and presentation, but once you factor in the crippling absence of online play, it becomes harder to make a call the better of the two.

A rental at best. [July 2009, p.81]

Very few redeeming features can pull SA back from the brink of feeling more like a half finished game with unforgiving controls. It will leave you with blisters, but not the good kind.

Overall the game smacks of rushed development. 49gamers obviously decided that they would speed the game out for the Olympic tie-in, regardless of whether they had the license or not. Unfortunately, the gameplay isn't anything particularly exciting and is in some places completely devoid of entertainment.

Summer Athletics offers us a number of track and field challenges that in almost every case fails to be interesting, or work especially well for that matter. A lackluster career mode and the absence of online play via Live is just another nail in the coffin for this game. If this game had been released in conjunction with the summer Olympics of 2004 it might have come off as a decent experience. Today it's just another poor attempt of recreating track and field in a videogame.