Pax Athletica--a new track and field game developed and published by Reaxion, produced by Tricycle NYC, and bolstered by a promotional agreement with Adidas--has thrown in its lot with a spate of contemporaneous, similar titles, all of which are hoping to catch a boost by timing their releases around the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. In Pax Athletica's case, this gentle promotional shove isn't likely to ameliorate its series of core deficiencies. Repetitive events and a lack of interactivity ensure that this game simply isn't much fun, even with its online scorekeeping and noble premise taken into account.

Pax Athletica offers you a choice of seven events.

The idea in Pax Athletica's story mode is to play through seven of the greatest moments in competitive sports history. The game never refers directly to the Olympics, but it's pretty clear which "Games" are taking place. If you best a particular mark, you unlock the next event. And after you've successfully completed all seven events, you are granted access to exhibition mode, which lets you try for the world record in any of the events. The game keeps local records as well as uploading them to a central server, so you can compete against your best marks or compare your prowess with other Pax players as you choose. This functionality has become quite common in the pantheon of mobile track and field games, but Pax Athletica also allows you to create and use multiple personas simultaneously.

Unfortunately, Pax Athletica isn't really compelling enough to warrant this kind of complex record-keeping. The seven watershed moments--which include the hammer throw at the first modern Olympics of 1896, Jesse Owens' sprint past Hitler's box in Berlin in 1936, and the famous jetpack flight at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles--are each accompanied by a short text passage, ostensibly to draw your attention to the cultural significance of the event. This is a worthy goal, but the descriptions of what actually happened are mostly too cryptic to inform those who aren't already familiar with these events. For instance, the pole vault event's intro tells you that "In 1972, the athletic community declared, the games must go on," making no reference whatsoever to the Black September massacre--or to how pole vaulting fits into the mix, for that matter.

Since many of these allusions make little sense, Pax Athletica's historical façade peels away rapidly, baring a surprisingly sparse track and field game to the open air. Indeed, five of the seven events, including the hammer throw, the 200 meter dash, diving, gymnastics, and the pole vault, are essentially meter-based minigames that you play using a single button. There are a few variations between the events -- the hammer throw lets you select the angle of release, for instance, and the pole vault allows you to set the height of the bar -- but most of the time gameplay comes down to carefully watching a stuttery, lagged meter and trying to stop it in the right place. Your performance in this task determines the numerical success of your athlete, who performs his or her duty with no further input from you. There seems to be little variation in animation, no matter what your range of performance is. If you really botch an event, your character may stumble or belly-flop, but otherwise you'll be watching him or her perform the same motions each time, with only the score changing. The two exceptions to the rule, fencing and jetpacking, are less soporific, because they offer more for you to do. Fencing uses most of the keypad for its array of moves, which includes high and low thrusts and blocks, although it's easy enough to best the CPU by rapidly alternating attacks. The jetpack event is probably the most fun of the seven. It's built around an easy three-button control scheme by which you can move left, move right, and thrust. The object is to pop as many balloons as possible while avoiding a dole of doves that enters from either side of the screen. This event's Lunar Lander-style physics and hands-on control make it more enjoyable than the other events--by a wide margin--simply because the game doesn't dumb down the event to the point of tedium.

A lack of interactivity keeps Pax Athletica off the medal podium.

Pax Athletica's graphics aren't bad on the LG VX6000. The game's color palette is bright, and all of the events run at a reasonable speed. The small amount of character animation that each event contains is very detailed and realistic. For example, the maneuvers in the diving and vaulting events appear legitimate, and if your hammer thrower stumbles out of the ring, he'll take a very painful-looking pratfall. The game also features different character sprites for each event. On lesser handsets like the LG VX4600, however, the game's graphics suffer a noticeable hit in both quality and fluidity. Pax Athletica's sound is relatively strong, with a decent selection of background tunes for the title screen and for before and after each event. There are no in-game sound effects, however.

To summarize, Pax Athletica is conceptually interesting, but it delivers nothing more than listless play in practice. Track and field games are a risky business, because the simple nature of the events can often lead to chronic underinvolvement on the player's part. Pax Athletica exacerbates this problem by boiling entire events down to a button press or two. More interaction between game and player would have gone a long way toward fixing what ails Pax Athletica, but as is, its entertainment value doesn't hold up.

Editor's note 09/03/2004: Our original review of Pax Athletica was erroneously based upon an unfinished version of the game. GameSpot regrets the error.