rating:4
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.
Each of the mountain ranges - including The Canadian Rockies, Alaska, Patagonia, Antarctica, The Alps, Africa, The Himalayas, Siberia, Japan, and New Zealand - has its own appearance and pitfalls, and the progression of the story allows you to be wowed each time you access a new area. Gameplay modes within these terrains consist of the expected race and trick mode, but the mix in gameplay provided by what is essentially an end of level boss in Survival mode is a welcome inclusion, even if it's a little too easy. Graphically the game impresses but never shines, although the initial reaction to the new mountain ranges is one of heightened anticipation, such is the speed and manic nature of the game that they don't need to be anymore than what they are. In other words, they're pretty much ideal. Oh yeah, the tricks are pretty good too. Like similar titles the slow burn of building your combo meter until you get to gut-bursting 1080 roundhouse slobber-knockers (I'm not sure these are snowboarding terms) is the norm. But it's the ridiculous nature of the TRICKY moves that cements this game as one to love like games gone by. Building up your tricky meter as you string along jump-after-trick-after-grind is where the tension lies until reaching the crescendo where finally landing the 20+ moves is the key to victory. And yet, this all comes together with such a natural fluidity that newcomers to the genre shouldn't feel overawed. Take grinding for example... you can't fall off. What's that about?
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).
But competing online was always where this genre needed to go, no more sitting alone in your bedroom trying to outdo your own scores, SSX provides the opportunity to try to be the best in a hassle-free manner that it works both for the compulsives, and for those merely wanting to be better than their friends. It's the simplicity of the game that is its charm, managing to make you feel as accomplished as those real-life snowboarders that erm... grind off helicopters or fly over ravines or use oxygen masks to offset death. It is a whole load of crazy that fools you into thinking everything hyper-real is normal. And brilliantly for SSX, its just that normal is incredibly entertaining.
SSX is available to buy on
XBox360 and
PS3 now.