With long school holidays just around the corner, a game that promises to keep the little darlings amused when the weather refuses to play ball could be money well spent. Unfortunately, this beach-themed offering from THQ’s value range is more Bognor than Bondi.
On paper, Big Beach Sports 2 is an attractive proposition: eight loosely summer-themed games and a price point to suit the most stretched budgets.
However, whether taken as a whole or broken down to its constituent parts, it’s hard to find any one piece of the package that justifies even the price of around £15.
Colourful graphics and lively sounds add some gloss, but there’s nothing here for the serious gamer and not enough in-your-face fun to engage those just starting out.
The games themselves are reasonably easy to pick up and Surfing might see you digging out your Balance Board for the first time since you gave up on Wii Fit but menus force annoying button combinations when simple double-clicks would make things flow much more freely.
Yes, there are some reasonable moments.
The Canoe, Dune Buggy and Water Rocket games offer decent racing action especially in multiplayer mode but there’s not a huge amount of variety between the three and none gets close to challenging any of the dedicated racers you probably already own, or could pick up for next to nothing in your video store’s pre-owned bin.
And in other areas, the game really misses the mark. Cricket is little more than an aimless swing of the controller and Football makes some of those early games in South Africa seem exciting.
Ultimately, Big Beach Sports 2 makes sense if it keeps the children happy and perhaps sparks their interest in investigating more sophisticated games in future.
But, in our case at least, our two soon became bored and were quickly downing tools to play in the garden.
Perhaps not a bad buy after all then…
Big Beach Sports 2, developed by Jet Black Games and published by THQ, is on sale now.