Winter Sports 2011: Go for Gold - Xbox 360

Let’s face it - we’re never going to get the figure or the stamina to compete in Winter sports activities ourselves. But we can’t deny that watching events like Skiing, skating and snowcross makes us want to go out and get involved. Rather than do ourselves an embarrassing injury, 49Games has come to our rescue by recreating a whole host of popular snow sports for the Xbox 360.

The first thing that will hit you when you load up an event in Winter Sports 2011: Go for Gold is the crisp graphics, which combine the latest effects with naturalistic physics to effectively simulate each activity. Its accessible control system makes it great to jump into, but challenging to master as you try to wrap your head around increasingly more difficult courses.

As you would expect in a game like this, multi-player action is present and correct, with the ability to interact with your opponents more directly to mess up their run. Tactics become key in each event - for example in skating you can choose to slipstream, knuckle down and go turbo around the course or go for hard physical impacts. Characters will visibly change in-game depending on how fair (or unfair) you’re playing by the rules.

A plethora of modes are available - from Career and Challenge, to Quick Cup and Online play - across nine different sports including Snow Mobile, Snowboard Cross, 4-men bobsled and the biathlon. 15 different cups to win, capture the flag options in multi-player and online leaderboards make for a complete winter sports product. more