Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games (3DS)

In my review of Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, I made sure to note how wonderfully that game represented the host city, and while the brilliance and excitement of Carnival really helped that crossover Olympic sport game have a distinct identity, a game like Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games for the 3DS not only shows how the host city was sometimes barely part of the backdrop, but how it can actually feel underwhelming or almost like it’s joking at the expense of the city. See, while this Olympic sports game does allow you to play a multitude of events, it features a story mode that focuses in on its reputation as the “City of Fog”, the villains even covering up recognizable locations as they make sure to add a dose of supernatural fog to the city’s climate.

Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games’s story mode kicks off the day before the opening ceremony to the Olympics, but the mad scientist Doctor Eggman and evil turtle king Bowser feel they have been snubbed when they don’t receive an invite to the games and aim to get their revenge by covering London in an odd mist known as the Phantasmal Fog. Not only does the colorful fog obscure the athletes’ vision, but from the fog emerges aggressive counterparts of the competitors who can only be sent away by beating them in an Olympic event. Luckily, the famous heroes Mario and Sonic as well as their group of friends find the venues where such events take place conveniently free of fog when they go up against the doppelgangers, but the battle against the fog duplicates and the cronies or corrupted allies working for Bowser and Eggman ends up being how the game strings along a story that mostly just gives you a little taste of character personalities before moving you along to the next events or plot developments. Interestingly, you can face enemies like the regal ghost King Boo or the jewel thief Rogue the Bat in story mode events but can’t play as them, but it does add a nice change of pace from the fog clones and in the bonus episodes you can even get amusing side stories like Bowser’s minions trying to set up rigged events against heroes so he can feel good about himself. You don’t get to see much of London’s sights though, Big Ben getting some focus but others spend a lot of time steeped in fog and even locations like the British Museum are rendered generically with just large vases and ornate plates on design rather than anything that makes it feel like the real location.

When it comes to structuring the sports you’ll be playing in story mode, the game also finds a good middle ground between providing alternatives and still making sure you improve your skills to actually clear all its episodes. Most story missions require you to select which challenges you want to clear to try and finish the chapter, and while some of the challenges are single event competitions, others take the form of Medleys. Medleys group together a bunch of Olympic Events and rather than just trying to win every single game, you can afford to place second or even lose so long as you make it up in others. Available also as a multiplayer mode, Medleys are more about earning points through placing higher than other competitors and so long as you have the most at the end, you can try to make up for events you perform poorly at with excellence in others. Single player does let you retry a Medley event so long as you do so before the scores are displayed which helps Medleys from becoming frustrating in solo play, and in the later bonus episodes you will find computer players will not hold back. When set to their highest difficulty or faced later in the story, computer-controlled athletes can routinely hit near or even above the world record in the event, and while this can be annoying in certain events as we’ll discuss later, some like archery actually are improved by the tough challenge since it requires you to actually learn about how to account for the wind gusts that complicate your arrow’s flight path.

Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games only includes real sport events rather than anything that better matches the super-powered video game characters participating in them, but you can still see their incredible abilities kick in at times like when Silver the Hedgehog will showboat by teleporting around in the air while doing the Trampoline. There are quite a few oddities about how the events are played in this installment though. First and perhaps least damaging to how entertaining they are is the fact that, while there are 56 events in total to compete in, the characters you can play as in events is incredibly limited. The friends and enemies of Mario and Sonic are all grouped into small groups of four and for each event, only one group is allowed to participate at all. Even though you see someone like Bowser play Beach Volleyball in the story, you can never select him despite him being available for things like Wrestling and the Javelin Throw. Mario and Sonic can compete against each other, but they can’t go up against any of their villains in the multiplayer and solo play modes. It is somewhat understandable that some limitations would have to exist considering how many events there are, and things like seeing a Magikoopa compete in a BMX race in Story Mode get a pass because him riding a broom would likely be an unfair advantage in regular play, but while there are plenty of sports to play, some of them don’t even match the event they’re meant to embody much.

The Mario & Sonic Olympic Games series often reduces Olympic events into simple minigames and has always struggled with trying to make more out of quick events like the 100m dash, but Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games pares down the competitions even further to the point some events barely embody the sport they’re adapting. The Marathon does not have you control the running at all, instead you try to time a button press to snag a water bottle to help cool down your athlete and the person who grabs the best water bottles wins. Some sports benefit from this weird approach, Boxing actually being boiled down to a game of chicken where you want to throw your singular punch before a meter fills up, but whoever is closer to the end of the meter wins. The opponent’s meter fills faster once you throw your punch, but they can still potentially save themselves if they’re quick to react, making this a quick little tense competition that at least works as a fun minigame. Most of the time though, if an event is something more complex than a sprint, throw, or something that can be turned into a rhythm game challenge like Synchronized Swimming (Duet), there’s a decent chance it will be reduced down to a single action. Handball is turned into you playing goalie only and in Football you’re on your own kicking towards the goal, but some sports like the Double Trap shooting event are decent accuracy tests and event likes team Show Jumping has you complete a obstacle course of decent size atop your horse so not all of them are shallow or harmed by their reduction in complexity.

What many are hurt by though is the abundant focus on control gimmicks. While some minigames like the 1000m Kayak just require you to rotate the 3DS circle pad as fast as you can and others like gymnastics Rings are about timing button releases, the minigames that really bog down this collection are those that involve motion controls and weirdly enough the 3DS microphone. Weightlifting is really just a test of breathing at the right moment to raise the weight, the 100m Breaststroke is about getting your breathing right when your swimmer’s head is above water, and Sailing annoying enough requires you to blow many times to guide a boat you barely have control over. Blowing into the microphone is rarely skillful, harder to time accurately than button presses, and can even get you lightheaded if you have to repeat events in story mode since the AI athletes can do absurdly well without worrying about lung strength or the microphone picking them up accurately. Shotput even determines the distance of your throw based on a real life shout it wants you to do, but the motion controls can be even worse. Aiming a gun or bow with them works fine and makes you pretty accurate, but some events ask you to do things that might make you worry for your system’s safety. Hammer Toss actually asks you to hold your system horizontally and whip it around to determine the strength of your throw, and yes, one of the Story Mode bonus missions involves a world record breaking Donkey Kong the gorilla facing off against you in Hammer Toss so it almost invites incident with this unfortunate control method. Even touchscreen minigames like the 100m Freestyle swim ask you to use your fingers to tap two sides of the screen rapidly yet it doesn’t seem to detect the taps as well as it could. An event like the Modern Pentathlon can get away with some control gimmicks since its challenge is swapping between sports rapidly and the challenge is more doing the right thing than doing it exceptionally well, but even if a sport is represented true to life, it can end up bogged down by controls that hurt the fun and make you dread if they pop up in a Medley.

THE VERDICT: While the Medley system in Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games is a good way of connecting small minigames into a more meaningful challenge and the story mode can put some legitimately challenging events in your path, unfortunately this crossover sports game really trims down the events it presents into competitions that are often too bare bones to get invested in when they’re not sabotaging their enjoyability with gimmicky microphone and motion controls. Anything with a flicker of creativity or an effective design is barely going to last, and with many events even poorly representing the sports they’re adapting, there’s not much value in picking up this poorly curated minigame collection, especially with how weakly it presents London while limiting the available athletes so much.

And so, I give Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games for Nintendo 3DS…

A BAD rating. There are some surprisingly smart ideas found in this game and it’s a shame they have to share space with so many flawed concepts. To embody the weariness of a runner participating in the 1500m dash, the buttons you use to run and switch lanes swap, meaning you have to stay canny to keep ahead of your opponent. On the other hand, you have events like Basketball where you have to thrust your system forward to even shoot for the net or Synchronized Swimming (Team) where you need to jerk the system around rhythmically.  Microphone games especially feel ill conceived since the interaction is difficult to make anything out of, but even if you cut away the minigames that play poorly, the basic design so many of the sports assume robs the ones of their potential to carry the experience. Beach Volleyball for example strips away all control over movement, meaning you just press the buttons to hit the ball, meaning it can really drag as you’re just waiting for someone to slip with limited options to bait out mistakes. Even if you curate the minigames you play on your own time or with other players, you won’t find yourself with enough substantial amusements to make Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games the kind of game you’d want to keep returning to. A game of chicken in Boxing is fine for a quick play, but there aren’t enough events that are both designed well and have a range of outcomes to warrant continued interest. Many of the minigames that do work feel like they could be featured in Mario Party, but that series adds a board game framing to make the minigames hold weight whereas here only the Medleys can really make them feel more meaningful and even then some seem designed to end so quickly you barely get time to practice them or get invested in the outcome of the match.

The plot about London being covered in fog ends up being one of the game’s better ideas oddly enough, since at least the game seems to have a decent understanding of how much it lets its characters talk without things dragging before laying out a good spread of events to compete in. Unfortunately, rather than choosing preferred events, you’ll often be avoiding certain ones with a passion and dreading medleys you might have to do where annoying gimmicks end up too important to your success. Being able to boast about over 50 events was likely meant to be the main draw but it hardly feels like a plus with how poorly many were realized, and while you can try to stick to the ones with some more thought put into them, it’s probably better to just give Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games for 3DS a hard pass, especially with so many other Mario & Sonic Olympic Games titles to choose from that have more thought put into them.