Shaun White's Snowboarding

Reviewer Rating

User Rating

1 of 1

A pretty mediocre game

It's been a long time since there has been a snowboarding game worth playing.

With EA's SSX series on hiatus and Microsoft's Amped having seemingly hit a snowdrift after the third instalment of the game, Ubisoft have spotted a gap in the market and have attempted to fill it with Sean White's Snowboarding.

SSX has always taken the over-the-top, cartoonish and easy to pull-off arcade approach, with high scores and combo multipliers always a few button taps away. Amped on the other hand has taken a more serious, almost simulation style approach to things, attempting to bring a semblance of realism to the game, with simpler moves proving trickier to do successfully.

In making Shaun White's Snowboarding, Ubisoft have attempted to combine the best parts of SSX with Amped, however in doing so the game falls somewhere in the middle and fails to reach the heights of either of those titles.

Initial impressions are promising. Running on the same engine that powered last year's smash hit Assassin's Creed, the graphics are suitably impressive, while there are four massive mountains to explore, with each one offering a (mostly) restriction free, free-roaming experience.

Once you get past the obligatory character creations screen you stepping out onto the slopes and it's then that the first doubts begin to emerge.

The developers have at least attempted to implement a realistic snowboarding experience, so you'll find none of the gravity defying 'uber-tricks' of SSX at the get-go, however, that's where the attempt at realism ends.

For most of the game you'll find yourself almost aimlessly wandering around the mountains in search of golden coins. Yes, really - golden coins. The staple of Mario and a hundred other platformers, in a snowboarding game, and it's at this point that alarm bells start to ring.

Instead of competing in regular freestyle, slalom and big jump contests you'd expect from a snowboarding game you're instead forced on a banal treasure hunt that, because you're strapped to a board that's designed to go only one way downhill quickly becomes a chore.

Sure, the coin hunt encourages exploration and the mountains contain enough nooks and crannies to ensure there's always something new to search out, but the almost platform-game like mechanics in a snowboarding game just don't fit and remove any sense of immersion. It almost seems that the developers spent all their efforts creating an impressive free-roaming game world and then struggled to find something to fill it with.

In between these treasure hunts there are other, more traditional challenges scattered across the mountains from straight out racing to grind challenges. However even then these are let down by the imprecise controls that, at times, make it feel like your character is floating above the snow as opposed to gliding and cutting through it.

There's also a totally unnecessary story mode that follows your progression and sees your character performing all kinds of mundane tasks for the titular Shaun White, and like most other parts of the game, it feels tacked on and the result of some focus group rather than a genuine design decision.

Shaun White's Snowboarding is a schizophrenic game and in the effort of attempting to be all things to everyone, it ends up being a pretty mediocre game that fails to even be the sum of its parts.

Rob Wright