The one thing 49Games has succeeded in doing is making Winter Sports 2009 very easy to pick up and play. Of the 16 events, taken from ten disciplines (snowboard half-pipe, skiing, ski jumping, speed skating, biathlon, curling, figure skating and the much-alike trio of bobsleigh, skeleton and luge), none of them require much more effort than moving the left stick and pressing A – and single taps only, there’s no Track & Field-style mashing going on except for the speed skating start. Where Summer Athletics tried to mix things up a little and perhaps over-complicate things, Winter Sports 2009 is remarkably straightforward and you’ll be bagging gold medals with very little effort in next to no time. This may disappoint those of you who like the greater challenge, and the sense of achievement putting together tricky combos or pulling off complex button patterns can bring. However, it does make the title approachable for all levels of gamer and those with a more fiercely competitive streak can look to the leaderboards or multiplayer sessions where the finer art of shaving tenths off your times really comes into play.

The events themselves aren’t too bad but it is often quite slow and mundane stuff. The skiing is probably a high point, with a great sense of speed and fluidity to the action – as also felt in the skeleton, luge and bobsleigh (each of which seem almost impossible not to win) but there’s not much else that really stands out. Besides some nice rain effects on the camera, the visuals are functional at best, the characterisation is pretty poor and the overall presentation is nothing more than a distraction that will have you pressing the A button more to skip scenes than you’ll use it in the events. There’s also a bizarre inconsistency with different characters used before, during and after the events. In addition, the commentary – which is largely pointless and annoying in a Scene It? manner, and saved only by a running story in career mode featuring the co-commentator and an incident with an Argentine athlete – also manages to change the sex of your character mid-events and if we wanted to be really fussy, we’d point to the laziness of the developers not to even bother changing the two-woman and four-man bobsleigh teams from a single name and a lone figure on the podium. This kind of lacklustre presentation may have cut it a few years ago but it’s hardly at the cutting edge of what we’ve come to expect from current generation titles.

As well as being able to tackle any event individually, you can enter competitions consisting of three, nine and 16 events (and custom-create your own), take on a fairly mundane career or pit your skills against the 42 challenges in Campaign mode. The career simply plays out as a series of competitions featuring at least three events. A gold medal is worth three points, silver is worth two and a bronze gets you a single point with the overall winner being the person with the most points after all events – which you need to do in order to unlock further competitions and new venues. Considering how easy most of the events are, you shouldn’t need too many attempts to work your way through the career. Success does bring with it added experience points to improve your skills but none of these are noticeable anywhere except if you compare your old times, and the only extra challenge comes as the AI competition gets progressively harder – but this simply means you should be winning by only two or three seconds rather than ten. This doesn’t prevent the game from being enjoyable, though, and not every event is a foregone conclusion. However, this means that the career feels more like a production line of events you’re working through to gain a few Achievement points rather than actually aspiring towards any kind of goal.

The greater challenge can be found in the Campaign, which opens up with an assortment of very easy challenges (such as landing a ski jump or collecting coins in the slalom) before quickly descending into some ridiculous tasks that will have you replaying them over and over. But the final kick in the teeth for all the hard work it takes to get here is that none of your scores and times in Campaign and Career mode count towards the leaderboards – only those from the competitions or single events count. And even then the scores are split into difficulties, which have absolutely no relevance to your ability to race faster, jump further or pull off better tricks. It’s like the developer spent too long thinking about all the wrong things and it’s only because the game has a price tag under £30 that we can just about forgive it.