Big Beach Sports (Wii)

I thought this game was going to be fun and it might even challenge Wii Sports, but sadly, it doesn’t even come close.

There are 6 games to play in Big Beach Sports, which include Volleyball, Disc Golf, Cricket, Boules, Football, and American Football.

The controls are very simple and basic. For most of the games, all you need to do is swing the Wii Remote and then let your characters take over automatically to do the main functions. There are a couple of controls for the games where you can throw things differently by pressing A or B and then swinging. This is good for the younger audience as they’ll be able to get straight into the games and not find it confusing. I think that the older gamers might find it a little too simple, and not much of a challenge.

The graphics are really nice and add to the game, and even the music, I found was pretty cool at first, but then it just ended up getting a bit tedious. I like that there are lots of native island characters around the games and little huts to give the scenes more of a Caribbean beach feel.

The lack of depth to the game is another sore point. Had this game had online capabilities it might have stood the test of time and encouraged more people to go out and buy it.

Big Beach Sports isn’t all bad. There is the impressive feature of being able to connect to your DS via the download play and create a face for your character using the stylus, which is then sent back to your Wii and saved. Maybe another feature of creating your own uniforms might have been fun too. Unfortunately there is no Mii supported function which is a let down as it would be fun to see your Mii getting a tan on the beach whilst playing sports.

As a single player game I wouldn’t really bother buying as you’ll be bored of the game within a couple of hours. You can either play a quick game or tournaments which have 3 settings, Easy, Medium and Hard. There are no rewards for winning tournaments and I would have thought unlockable characters might have helped and maybe even special moves for each sport could have been fun.

This is definitely a multiplayer party game which could be fun, but again, I can’t see it being a game that you’d want to play again and again as you might start to get a bit bored after a couple of games.

For the price, it’s not bad, and definitely a game for the kiddies. But I’d stick with Wii Sports for the main multi-sports game so far on Wii.

2 out of 5 (3 for multiplayer)

Ender