The Winter Olympics - a compendium of ruthlessly competitive sports designed to test the agility, endurance and ability of the world's top athletes. But unfortunately, when it comes to athletics and track sports games, the only thing they ever seem to test is the gamer's patience. So will Winter Sports be the game to change all that? In the wake of the Winter Olympics 2006, can this sports sim capture the thrilling intrigue and patriotic passion that the Olympics generated? With the competition looking tired and tacky, will Winter Sports be the game to grab the gold?

It's unlikely. Very unlikely. The game is dreary and slack throughout. Even the raving winter sports enthusiast will struggle to get excited about it. The tedious tone is set from the opening screens - straight away you recoil at the limp and lacklustre presentation. Admittedly the game misses out on a major sporting license but there's no excuse for this dreadful lack of effort. This is supposed to be a magnificent worldwide competition, but it would be a miracle if the game's drab and uninspiring interface gets so much as a small smile out of you, let alone a patriotic whoop. And things don't get much better during the game itself; the graphics are uniformly flat and lifeless - each ski slope is blighted with two-dimensional cardboard trees and clumpy unconvincing snowflakes, while the motion is laughably bad - most game modes suffer from awkward and angular movements, making the players look more like cybermen than world-class athletes. Of course, the much loved Track and Field always looked unashamedly basic, but Winter Sports' ugliness is well beyond skin deep. Yes, with Track and Field it didn't matter - the gamer got the impression that the modest graphics were a consequence of all the producers' effort going into the stellar gameplay. With Winter Sports it's not like that. In fact, it's a mystery, as no element of this game shows signs of extensive effort.

The sound is just as pitiful. In fact, forget the Winter Sports virtual tournament; the real competition here is between the graphics and the sound - they're deadlocked in a race to reach the highest levels of amateurishness. As you ski down slopes, the sorry attempt to convey the crowd noise has more in common with the static burr of a television set than the bustling excitement of an international sports competition. Then there's the commentary - a pitifully sparse collection of comments provided by television's Tim Caple and Sue Thurle. Their sly sardonic jibes at your performance add nothing to the game, except, perhaps, the chance to chuckle at the similarities between Tim Caple's corny quips and the bumbling idiocy of The Day Today's blunderbuss commentator Alan Partridge.

So which sports does the game feature? Well, slalom, skiing (alpine and cross country), snowboarding and shooting are all here, but the game shows a shocking neglect to variety, choosing to omit curling, figure skating and luge. As for the events that do feature, the painfully simple gameplay means that most of them are butchered, or at the very least severely belittled. For example, alpine skiing is reduced to a few lazy rolls of the left analogue stick, which is as unchallenging as it is unimpressive. Slalom uses the same basic engine but adds the custom gates to ski through. It's perhaps the most enjoyable of the events, but next to it, alpine skiing is left looking naked and meaningless.

Perhaps you'd expect snowboarding to be the most thrilling of the events, but you'd be wrong - this is yet another hope that is crushed and battered by Winter Sports. The downhill offering is about as likely to get your adrenaline bubbling as the Radio 4 shipping forecast [In that case Fran from Black Books is arguably the only person who will get turned on by the gameplay! Apologies for the obscure reference, fans of the show will appreciate it though! Ed]. Some of the features are comically bad - like the jumping, which shows utter disregard for the most basic laws of physics. Then there's cross country skiing, a poor stab at emulating the button-bashing charm of Track and Field, but clumsy controls mean that Winter Sports' true colours soon surface. And shooting is embarrassingly bad - it genuinely seems to be modelled on those parasitic duck-shooting spyware pop ups.

One of the game's (almost) redeeming features is its comprehensive multiplayer coverage. Winter Sports offers the option to have four players competing using a single joypad. It's a resourceful idea but it's very unlikely you'll find three friends who will want to play this with you. But ever the optimist, let's imagine you do - once you've lowered your expectations a bit, you may well be able to get a good competition going. If you're lucky enough to be competing against other players then this can add a degree of challenge and enjoyment - both of which are sorely missed in single player mode.

It's probably a good thing that this game doesn't carry a sporting license or the logo of a major competition - it's so bad that the Winter Olympics would be better off without being associated with it. Make no mistake, at times this verges on unplayable. A quick bout of Winter Sports doesn't just dampen any enthusiasm for the sports themselves, but drowns it with torrents of cruel, icy water. After a few hours of playing the game I was bored and miserable. I put down the controller and my skier collided with the fence. "What a poor performance. If that's all he's got to offer, he may as well have stayed in bed," lamented Tim Caple. And he could just as easily have been talking about this game…

Reviewed by Robert Jackman for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).