Going way back to the days of playing the original Summer Games by Epyx on my Commodore-64 I’ve been a fan of multi-event sports games. Whether geared towards the Olympics, specific types of sports, or whatever else people could come up with, I’ve appreciated the efforts of developers who have figured out ways to provide a taste of family-friendly athletic competition that are approachable for all ages. How well games like these have accomplished this goal have varied wildly, but I remain hopeful every time I start one up. 

In the case of Smoots Summer Games 2, I was initially pretty excited with what seemed to be a title with some potential. Granted, track and field events are among the most adapted, so they also may be the easiest to get right, but with a few of those events under my belt it seemed like they got off to a strong start. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long from there for some significant cracks to begin showing. Whether the issue was tied to the controls being poorly planned or implemented, or even just the in-game instructions for how to tackle each event being hard to understand, things actually got pretty ugly for a while.

Playing through all of the events, in the end it feels like there was a pretty even distribution of the good, the bad, and the very ugly. While it isn’t unusual for you to walk away from games like this with some events being more eagerly awaited than others, in this case the gap between the top and bottom was substantial, and not concerned with which were the most fun, some events just remained inexplicably hard to even find success with, even with repeated attempts. While I’d love to say that the experience at least came together enough to be worthwhile for people who are patient, the end product is just too much of an overall crapshoot to recommend.