SSX Review [XBox360]
Only time will tell if SSX has made the Extreme Sports genre relevant again, but if anything was going to do it, it's this game.
rating:4
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The Extreme Sports genre has been dormant for too long; for every bad decision the Tony Hawk franchise made, the more distant the memories of high stakes combo-building became. Thankfully though EA Canada have disregarded the last 7 years and gone back to the core game mechanic featured in the best of those titles, with the added twist of online oneupmanship. Starting your first run on SSX will feel as natural as the day your younger self stopped playing its predecessors. Dropping from the helicopter onto the slopes puts you immediately into the action, learning the game at such a pace thanks to the intuitive control scheme that the entire story mode seems like one large training ground for what is to come. You could argue a game like this doesn't really need a story mode, but such is the inoffensive simplicity of it that it never grinds. Challenged with conquering the world's nine deadly descents using a variety of characters, each with only slightly differing traits, your team is up against former SSX member Griff in a race to see who can conquer them first. Told through a mixture of high-res cut scenes and inexplicably awful comic book style ones, the story has no relevance, and it really doesn't matter.
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The race down the mountain-side is expertly complimented by the soundtrack, those extreme sports stalwarts Run DMC feature, coupled with a mixture of Hip Hop, Dub-Step, Electronica and Rock all seamlessly edited on the fly depending on how your run is going. It's subtle, but it heightens the intensity of a run. But all this would leave you feeling short-changed if it wasn't for RiderNet, SSX's global hub for competing online. The one player, though fun, is both short and poses no real challenge. Competing online is another beast all together. In what I liken to the leader-boards on the excellent Trials HD, the very nature of the game plays on the minute details in both points and handling, and so seeing a friend on your list occupying the spot above you is enough motivation to hit the slopes, bail out of a trick hit restart and repeat (on a side note, the restart function is a bit cumbersome as the track needs time to reload again, thus losing the rapid pulse of the game).