Definitely the weakest out of the Olympic games I've played but still a good game. I can tell they wanted to utilise the gamepad but it just falls short here as most of it boils down to "tilt the gamepad!" or "swipe the screen!!" and it's not very interesting. The controls on some minigames are also super annoying.

I really like the roster for this game, it covers pretty much most of the important characters you'd wanna see. I also really like the locations of the dream events like Green Hill Zone, Delfino Plaza, Sweet Mountain and even Speed Highway.

As for the minigames, most of my favourites are dream events. Most games are fun, but then you have ones like Curling, Hole-in-one curling and the stupid Winter Sports Champion Race.

Winter Sports Champion Race is the final boss in Legends Showdown, the game's main campaign. There are 6 areas, and the first 5 pair you up with a group of 2 Mario and 2 Sonic Characters while you compete in 4 events with a boss at the end. It's a super short campaign but it's good for the most part. The final boss however is absolute horseshit. You face off against Rouge, Dry Bowser, Eggman Nega in a Winter Sports Champion Race while you battle terrible controls all while the opponents just speed boost out of nowhere.

Overall, it's a good game, but it's not great, better off playing the other ones.
60/100

an absolute slap in the face to fans of the olympic games video games. the og mario & sonic trilogy from 2008 to 2012 is regarded as one of the greatest trilogies in all of art. the continuation of this story is not only unnecessary but actively undermines the themes and ideas that made the original games so special. this was perhaps the first instance that showed the long-lasting and damaging affect that Hayao Miyazaki's dark souls had on the video game industry. please, let art live freely...

No 3DS version this time, this Winter Olympics game only released on the Wii U. You also need a fair few accessories to play it: a Wii U gamepad, a Wii Remote Plus (optional nunchuck) and a Wii sensor bar. The games don’t feature many options for alternative control schemes.

The main singleplayer move is “Legends Showdown”. There’s not much of a story: everyone is working together to win a trophy and has to compete against shadow versions of themselves. The game is split into groups of four characters (each with 2 Mario and 2 Sonic characters) and you go through a bunch of events as each. During this, you’ll play each game once. It’s simple, but I like it a lot. My only issue with it is that the instructions for the games don’t appear in this game, so you need to figure it out yourself.

The games themselves are a bit mixed, partly due to the controls. The Wii Motion Plus really doesn’t work well in this game, often becoming misaligned. Skiing and Speed Skating were both horrible due to this, and I couldn’t get parts of the figure skating to work at all. Snowboarding used the Game Pad tilt instead and worked extremely well. As you play through the games, you’ll swap between the Wii Remote and Wii U Game Pad – including Curling and the Biathlon, which uses both for different parts of the event. The best use of the controllers was the shooting part of the Biathalon, using the gyro for aiming and giving a closer view on the Game Pad screen – it bodes well for archery in the next Olympic games.

The dream events are a lot of fun, too, including a ball game that uses a snowball machine gun, a bobsleigh roller coaster race. The final event has competitors swapping between skis, skates, snowboard and bobsleigh as they have to take different routes to complete the course.

This also features a great multiplayer mode called “Action and answer tour” which combines a quiz and minigames. For example, there’s one where a you have to feel the pattern of a rumble, proceed through numbered gates to hear different ones and match the one to the first rumble. The best thing about this mode is that these use the controls and mechanics from the standard sports, so it feels like an extension and not an unrelated minigame collection.

This is is one of the better Mario & Sonic Olympic games.