I received Shaun White Snowboarding from Ubisoft last Wednesday for review. There aren't a lot of reviews up on the Internet yet, so I figured I'd use this space to give some brief thoughts on the game before the review appears officially on Thunderbolt.
The verdict? Meh. It's OK. It could be a lot better, but there are a few things that I really like. While the controls are kind of terrible (it seems way too difficult to jump from rail-to-rail), the mountains in the game are really awesome. I'm really enjoying exploring the mountains, and having five of them (a fifth is included with the Target special edition) means you're given a lot of variety. As a skier, I really appreciate the open design. I could never really get into the SSX or Cool Boarders games because they felt too confined. You just raced down a set path and never were able to explore. The Amped games on the Xbox were an improvement in that they let you move freely around the mountain, but that wasn't great either. Like Shaun White Snowboarding, I couldn't get comfortable with the controls in Amped either. They just don't really respond well.
It's also a little too hard to get to specific challenges. Though you can drop markers and return to that spot with the press of a couple of buttons, getting to actual challenges requires that you ride all the way over to the starting point. Why can I warp to the top of lifts and warp to marker spots, but not challenges? And while I'm at it, couldn't the company have done a better job organizing the store? In it's current form, you need to scroll through the boards individually. If you want a specific type of board, like a park board instead of a freestyle board, you have to scroll through a horizontal list that displays them one at a time. How come there's not a submenu with the various types of boards and, once you select the type of board you want, you can then scroll through them individually?
I will say, the graphics and the music are really good. The sun shines off the brilliant white snow, which cracks as you carve as your make way down the hill. The inclusion of avalanches is a nice touch. I love trying to race away from them and seeing how big of an avalanche I can create. I just wish they didn't stop randomly. I want to take the avalanche with me all the way down the mountain! I really like the rock soundtrack, which includes stuff from Modest Mouse, Incubus, Jefferson Airplane, Heart and tons of other artists.
But like everything else in the game, neither work perfectly. There's a bit too much clipping for comfort and there were times where I'd hear the one song two or three times in a twenty minute period of time. Kind of irritating.
I'll link to the full review on Thunderbolt when it gets posted. Hoping to have it written by the end of tonight and posted Monday.
