Sports Champions: One of the better Move titles out there.

FULL REVIEW

If you enjoy watching sports but are too lazy to actually go out and play them, Sports Champions may just be the game for you. This launch title for the PlayStation Move allows players to experience a bunch of sports in the comfort of their living room using Sony’s brand new motion controller. While it’s definitely geared toward the casual crowd, Sports Champions is interesting enough to appeal to the hardcore gamer as well. Sure it’s not going to replace your copy of God of War III or Uncharted 2, but it’s a pleasant break from stabbing and shooting people in the face.

On booting up the game you can choose from one of six sports in the main menu and play them alone in the career mode or take on a friend competitively on the same console (as of now Sports Champions does not support online play but it seems Sony may add a patch to fix that real soon). In the career mode you start off with the tutorial for each game after which you can play through a bunch of levels unlocking newer areas and some cosmetic stuff like outfits and equipment for your player. After a while the single player campaign can get a tad boring and the predictable AI doesn’t really help matters either which is why I strongly recommend playing this game with a friend or a relative.

As far as the sports themselves are concerned, I wasn’t overly impressed with the collection. I really enjoyed Archery, Table Tennis and Disc Golf but Bocce, Volleyball and Gladiator Duel quickly faded from my memory. First of all choosing something like Gladiator Duel is just plain weird. If they had to go with a combat sport they could have gone with Boxing or a Martial art. Also why choose something so obscure as Bocce instead of Bowling? I get the fact that they were trying to avoid being called a Wii Sports clone but comparisons were inevitable so may as well make the game a lot more entertaining. They have however added in a few cool variations to Archery in which you could play stuff like cross and knots on the target board. Sadly none of the other games offer such variety.

Visually the game’s a mixed bag. It looks good in places but certain environments end up looking a bit bland. While I was pretty impressed with the controller’s precision I have to voice my dissatisfaction at having to calibrate the controller over and over again every time I chose a different sport. It was a painful process that I hope will be ironed out in Move games to come.

There’s no doubt that the PlayStation Move is a pretty responsive piece of hardware and we could be looking at some pretty cool stuff in the near future. For now, the launch line has placed way too much emphasis on the casual stuff but if you do enjoy this kind of gaming, Sports Champions is one of the better Move titles out there. If you do pick up the game make sure you have someone to play it with as like I mentioned before, playing alone can get boring real fast.