E365 -- Family Ski probably owes its existence to the recently released Wii Balance Board, as other developers try to offer a product that can make use of Nintendo's new piece of hardware. Namco have shrewdly timed the release of Family Ski to perfection, encouraging gamers who've just shelled out their hard earned cash for Wii Fit to give this title a try.
Family Ski is a casual sporting experience, allowing you to take to the slopes at your own pace and decide for yourself what you'd like to do out of all the activities available to you at the Happy Ski Resort.
Once you've done a bit of basic character design you're ready to hit the slopes. The entire mountain is open to you from the get-go, though the first thing you'll notice as you're zipping down a slope is that you're not exactly zipping. Even at it's most intense, Family Ski is not a fast-paced game, and while the controls and movement of the balance board work great, the action seldom gets frenetic enough to get too excited.
The controls are simple, and involve either tilting to one side or the other with your Wii-mote and Nunchuk, or your balance board if you have one. There are a few variations here and there, but you should get the hang of it all pretty easily.
The game's biggest problem controls-wise, though, is once again because of the lack of speed. You'll constantly need to use your poles to gain momentum, and this means quite an intense workout involving pumping both hands in towards your body. The activity itself isn't that strenuous, but the amount of times you'll need to do it to really build up any significant speed certainly is. Ultimately, it feels like you're putting a huge amount of effort in order to get just a little bit of reward, which quickly becomes annoying. Family Ski would really have benifitted from incorporating some kind of speed control into the basic controls setup.
Family Ski puts quite a lot of effort into creating a social atmosphere at the resort, whether it be by bombarding you with in-game messages announcing some new event or get-together or having other skiers constantly come up to you to have a chat. You'll either love this or want to avoid it as much as possible, depending on your preference.
Family Ski is a decent effort and, other than the problems with speed, the balance board and motion-sensitive controls have all been well integrated, but unfortunately the core gameplay doesn't really make the grade.
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