Thin ice.
It's unfortunate that this frosty sports simulation has arrived just as everyone in Britain is thoroughly sick of bloody snow, but unlucky timing should be the least of its worries. The button-mashing, stick-waggling sports genre was never likely to reveal many hidden depths, but even by the limited standards of this peculiar subset of gaming Vancouver 2010 is a slender experience.
Some of the blame for its malnourished state can be directed at the event itself, which is a pale icy shadow of its more famous Olympic counterpart. Lower in profile, narrower in scope, it doesn't offer much room for a developer to impress: while the game of Beijing 2008 overstretched itself with 38 events, ranging from judo to javelin, Vancouver 2010 can only offer 14, the majority of which involve sliding down mountains as gracefully as possible.
With so little variety, the simplistic gameplay soon becomes a problem. Unless you're pathologically addicted to leaderboards, you will have accumulated lots of silver medals and exhausted the game's shallow charms before the opening ceremony of the real thing has finished.
