Celebrity Sports Showdown (Wii) Review

As a disappointing opening for the new EA Sports Freestyle name, the vague comedic likeness of sporting and musical celebrities don’t save Celebrity Sports Showdown from being an underwhelming collection of sports themed mini games. In an unnecessary attempt to emulate the popularity of Nintendo’s already widely circulated Wii Sports, the 12 included game types provide little entertainment or satisfaction when demanding repeated play for any real value in a purchase.

With the most basic gameplay and extreme ease in challenges, Celebrity Sports Showdown will appeal only to those primarily determined to finally play badminton as Fergie on their Wii. Filled with bright colours, festive music and permanent cheek-to-cheek smiles on each celebrity player, the overall aesthetic screams of a kids game and the lack of difficulty in single player makes multiple players a must for any form of challenging fun. Anyone who’s played to death the swarming abundance of other mini game collections on the Wii and still needs more, or is lured by the use of names like Avril Lavigne and Sugar Ray Leonard, will find that Celebrity Sports Showdown isn’t completely unplayable with a few odd enjoyable sports, and may actually have brief moments of honest fun.

With no game content outside of the twelve game modes that fun is sure to end as each solitary sporting match will only ever extend as far as five minutes. With twelve total game types this means you’re looking at an hour maximum of fresh gameplay before it starts to repeat and the bland nature of most of the games really stand out. While some games do have a few different controls and require brief learning, they play out quite simply for the most part with motion control in every event and tutorial tips always readily available. The use of celebrity names really adds nothing to the game, with no music or any content from the celebrities provided other than a brief bio at the point of choosing a character. The wacky nature of the sports isn’t complemented by the excessive and sloppy controls and I have no idea how flying jets that shoot rockets fits in with the other sports games.

Badminton and Beach Volleyball are nearly identical, and games heavy on the motion controls such as the Fighter Jets or Skiing are difficult to handle and lacking in any real substance. Celebrity Sports Showdown feels as though it has been designed in a day; and one not even requiring late-night Chinese take-out. Not only are the basic concepts so horribly… basic, the controls are sloppy proving hard to control and multiple obvious cases of lacking development time shine in events such as the Horse Racing and it’s horrible collision detection. It’s surprising in contrast to the well produced over-hyped jingle music and a few odd examples of detailed visuals so it’s clear where most the time and money went into creating Celebrity Sports Showdown.

Single player has a lot of characters to unlock in both ’Celebrity’ and ’Wannabe’ forms but each requiring a lot of play through multiple round robin tournaments for every character. Which character you pick alters nothing of the game so the illusion of excessive progression across 25 characters is actually the entire first tournament all over again and again. Unlocking every character would take an extremely long time considering how much you’d have to repeat all of these lame sports knock-ups, so again any short enjoyment within Celebrity Sports Showdown is found with friends only. Multiplayer is definitely a prerequisite for enjoying Celebrity Sports Showdown at all and with four full players there is some fun action to be found worthy of perhaps an evening’s rent with the kids. If you’ve only got two or three players, bots are necessary to ensure all the sports can be played properly and they have a common difficulty setting while the single player tournaments have a progressive difficulty increase.

Despite a good variety of options to pick specific sporting events across several tournament modes in multiplayer, there’s no way to specify teams in events such as 2 v 2 Badminton where you may want to match up certain friends or foes but all the other options are there. Options are a necessity in mini game collections and they’re all there to suit to ensure players can play exactly what they like and leave out the less developed sports such as Skiing or Curling that don’t translate to the Wii Remote controls well at all. It’s a surprise that most of the sports in the lineup are so underdeveloped and uninspiring considering the budget and production value that’s shown off by Electronic Arts’ big name sports license, but considering the huge focus on cashing in on the celebrity premise, its clear where all that budget and effort has gone. Despite efforts in presentation and style the celebrity names and sloppy motion controls are all that’s intended to sell copies of this latest addition to the Wii’s sea of mini game collections but instead set it way below the standard many have come to expect from a retail packaged collection.