Flick Champions Winter Sports Review

Chillingo has a way of finding the proverbial needle in the haystack and highlighting it for the entire world to appreciate. Their Flick Champions brand of games are a perfect example of this principle. Each of the most recent Winter Sports iteration’s six mini-games are barely passable on their own, but as a collective the game proves to be far more enjoyable. Is it fun enough to justify a purchase, or should this have been better served not hitting the slopes?

What would winter sports be without a snowball fight, right? Alongside the likes of genuine sports like hockey, slalom, and *sigh* curling, for some odd reason Flick Champions Winter Sports additionally lumps in the menacing childhood pastime. Aside from this singular curious inclusion, the other five events make perfect sense for the setting and all feature their own unique gameplay hook.

Though the game’s name mentions it explicitly, it bears noting that each game has extremely simplified mechanics, all revolving around quick screen strikes and finger slides. The controls almost seem too streamlined for their own good, because it robs each minigame of potential depth and replayability. Each sport begins to feel like its own self-contained one trick pony.

The singular way that collection redeems itself is the wide variety of different ways to replay. While it features the standard single player fair of quick match and different tournaments, there is also daily challenges and couch play multiplayer to keep things interesting. It isn’t enough to excuse the overall lack of any kind of complexity, but it is just sometimes more fun to play minigame collections in groups.

While Flick Champions isn’t anything worth writing home about, the many different ways to approach the title helps augment the replayability. It is hard to say how long it will maintain a player’s interest, but at least the potential for preoccupation is there.

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