You would probably compare Deca Sports with Wii Sports right away. But does this compilaton of ten games have the same appeal that made Wii Sports such a hit? Well… not quite.
Deca Sports is a varied and somewhat strange mix for a game with the word “sports” on the title. It includes figure skating, soccer, beach volleyball, badminton, kart racing, curling, archery, snowboarding, motocross and basketball.
Most of the games can be simply controlled by movements of the Wii-mote, with the Nunchuk controlling the movement of the character on the screen (when it applies).
Badminton is much like Wii Tennis, since your character moves automatically and you just have to swing. You can’t direcly control where you swing to though, but that seems to be affected by how quickly you swing.
Archery actually involves a bit of skill. To shoot an arrow, you press and hold B, use the Wii-mote to aim, and release B when you have your target. The score depends on how accurate your shot was, and weather effects such as wind will have an impact on the direction of your arrow.
Snowboarding is controlled by using the Wii-mote as the board: tip the front down to accelerate, tip it up to break, tilt to turn. Although your snowboarder can jump, there are no special moves or tricks to be executed.
Figure skating is probably the most entertaining, but maybe I’m a little biased here because it’s a sport that I really enjoy. Unfortunately, there are only three routines for this sport. In kart racing, you hold the Wii-mote sideways and use it as a steering wheel by tilting in the direction you want to turn.
For the most part, Deca Sports has plenty of options to keep a single player entertained, but some of the games allow up to four players to engage in some team sports (soccer, volleyball, basketball). These are always more fun to play when you have real people instead of the AI-controlled team members, which by the way, aren’t exactly smart.
Unfortunately the game only offers local multiplayer and no online option (as in most Wii games), but seeing as the single-player controls don’t work too well, you probably wouldn’t play it online for too long either.
There are a number of faults in Deca Sports, starting with the wonky and alternatively frustrating unresponsive or oversensitive controls. I think the ideas were in the right place as far as trying to get characters to respond to certain Wii-mote movments, but seems like there was little effort put into testing or perfecting these controls. The camera angles in some of the sports is fairly annoying, limiting your view considerably. The sound is completely forgettable, and the presentation isn’t overly impressive. You can’t even use your own Miis in the game or customize your character, and you will notice plenty of blurry landscape during the kar races or snowboarding sessions.
Even though the variety of activities would be something that should appeal to a wider range of gamers, I still would rather stick to my five responsive Wii Sports than ten other clunky ones.