Shaun White Snowboarding is Ubisoft’s first shot at the snowboarding genre. They teamed up with celebrity boarder Shaun White and came out with an overall bad experience. This game does a bad job of making you really feel like you’re flying down the slopes by its shoddy controls and bad physics. The game was an overall let down and won’t make you want to continue with it.
The graphics in Shaun White Snowboarding aren’t bad. They do a good job of recreating a mountain- scape and the atmosphere included. I generally found the area I was boarding down was nice to look at. One thing though was the character models. I was quite torn about how I felt about them. Normally they looked okay, but I was always looking at my guy from the back. The only aesthetic I didn’t like in this game was the character faces. I thought Shaun White’s character in the game is incredible ugly and looks almost last gen-like when it came to his face.
My favourite part about the game was the music line up. It did a good job on incorporating old pop/classic rock with some new age hits. This wasn’t that big a deal for me and I doubt for many of you since the game other than that wasn’t really fun to play. Though there’s no way to be able to choose which songs you want to listen to out of the selection you have. You can’t make a playlist of your favourites in it.
Now the biggest issue I had with this game was the controls and the difficulty that came along with them. The controls are just awful to work with and they make the game very hard and not enjoyable. Controlling the camera only works if you aren’t moving. You can’t look around you while you’re going down the mountain unless you come to a complete stop. Also you need to use the right trigger for most of your stunts as this is the jump button - it’s also the brake button. This causes you to have to move towards a jump and when you are on the jump, you have to start breaking to that your guy can get more height. All this does is slow you down and you can’t do as many tricks because you don’t have as much air time as you probably would have if you didn’t have to break. Another weird thing is that the right analog stick is for, while on the ground, turning your board. Which if you don’t have any speed, or aren’t landing from a jump, does nothing but help you slow down (giving us now three ways to slow down and stop). These controls just made me dislike playing and ending up getting frustrated to the point that coming back to the game was a challenge.
The next thing I didn’t like was how they made you do tricks. While you are doing a flip or a spin, you have a little meter come up below you to show your chance of landing it. You want to aim for the green middle area of it so that you have the best chance possible of landing the trick. Now when you are grinding something you can control where the arrow is on the meter so you can stay in the green pretty easily. When you are doing an aerial trick, you can’t control it at all. This means you need to judge your landing based on your body’s position, which can get pretty hard as you may not be able to tell the best angle to land compared to the slope below you. This just makes the tricks really hard to do if you’re just starting out which ups the learning curve quite a bit.
The game play in Shaun White Snowboarding is a double sided sword. It does a good job of letting you feel like you have an open environment. You can just mess around with tricks while going down the hill if you don’t feel like doing anything significant or you can move to these floating objects that let you get into a competition. The competitions can range from things like “most points received from only grinds” to “highest multiplier achieved”.
When it comes to the story line, it’s just dumb and needless. You’re some new shot kid who met up with Shaun White and his friends one day after wiping out on a jump. Shaun figures you have what it takes to make it big and that there’s something special about you. This all ends up with you becoming Shaun White’s errand boy by collecting giant floating coins for him. After you collect a complete set, he gives you a Focus Power. For example, the first one you receive is the ability to break through broken fences of some ice walls. After you get these new powers you now have to go collect more coins for Shaun which will test your ability to use the new Focus Power. After mastering the power and collecting all the coins, you move on... to receive another Focus Power to use to get Shaun more coins.
The last thing that felt really off about Shaun White Snowboarding was the speed of the game and the collision detections. No matter what kind of gradient you are faced with, you always feel like you are going really slow. If you ever do find yourself going fast, enjoy it, it won’t last long because you slow down really fast. But there are a few times that you will find yourself really flying, which is a great feeling. Though of course, you are bound to hit a tree or some sort of obstacle sooner or later. But in this game, when you run into an object at high speeds, or slam into a grind rail, nothing really happens to you. You will just bounce off the object with a slight deduction to any speed you still had.
Overall Shaun White Snowboarding was a huge let down and almost tedious to play. The poor quality controls are terrible when you first get into the game and only become tolerable after you pass through its long learning curve. If you do however get used to the game and find you can pull off tricks with ease, you will most likely get bored of the story line you are faced with. Shaun White Snowboarding does a terrible job of making you want to come back for more and should just be left alone.
Overall: 4/10
No comments:
Post a Comment