Original, addictive, and very straightforward

User Rating: 7.8 | Torino 2006 - The Official Video Game of the XX Olympic Winter Games PC
Considering there are very few games for the PC where you can play any of the slightly-less-than-extremely-popular sports, it's always great to see another Olympic sports game released. Athens 2004 was a great game, and Torino 06 is very much a similar kind of game, with many cool features. Unfortunately it also still carries some of the not so great features Athens had.

To start with the good points, the featured sports are all fun to play, quite easy to learn and the graphics are good. The commentary is somewhat repetetive, but not any worse or more irritating than in the Fifa series. The interface of the game is very good, it's very clear and incredibly easy to use. The game is also very addictive (at least, until now. I've only had it for 2 days and I already played it for more than 20 hours. Truth be told, it may therefore not be a very healty game...). I constantly find myself wanting to improve on my records, and I also still see a clear progression in my playing, so although it may be quite easy to learn the basics of the gameplay, there still is much room for improvement after that.

A minus is that there is not very much variation in the way you control the sportsmen. That might make the game a little boring after a while, but the thrill of playing the sports and setting new records more than makes up for it.
It's also too bad they didn't include more Olympic sports, although I've gotten used to that with the Olympic games. There are 8 sports included, but there are several subcategories so there is an acceptable amount of diversity. And since there are hardly any other games that allow you to play these sports, let alone offer a wider diversity, I can't really blame Torino.

Time will have to tell if the game will keep it's appeal to me in the next weeks. But considering the fact that I only got slightly bored with Athens 2004 after about half a year of pretty intensive playing I think I'll be enjoying Torino 06 for some time to come.