1. DTM3000

   9

   SSX is to put it simply a phenomenal game, one that I was greatly surprised by. After playing the demo, I was definitely convinced to buy this game and I am so glad I did, despite a few difficulty spikes this game is fun to play and watch the environment unfold in front of you. I am enjoying every single run that I have done thus far and the controls are so brilliantly mapped to where the game just feels 'right'. The animations are also phenomenal yielding some crazy ass tricks and some really cool atmospheric conditions. Overall I would recommend this game to anyone considering how fun it is to play not to mention watch and the implementation of rider net (aka autolog, battlelog etc) is really interesting as you can race 'ghost' versions of your friends times as well as race against them in real time. SSX is a phenomenal reboot for EA and I am hoping they continue this franchise.… Expand

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2. Grizmondus

   6

   I was excited for this game like any SSX fan was. After all, it is hailed as the best snowboarding game series ever, right? Remember the days of SSX Tricky & SSX 3, where you could pull off ridiculous combinations of tricks you'll never see in real life? Remember your willingness to beat your best racing times? Remember the awesome, vivid, wacky course designs? And remember when each character had a vibrant, unique personality with their own tricks to boot? Well, throw away all of that. While you still pull off superhuman tricks on your board this time around, now you have to watch where you do it. Racing times are now a frustrating endeavor to undertake because of the damn pits of death, and there's nothing wacky and interesting about either the courses or the characters. There's an overbearing layer of mind-numbing trial & error and sheer frustration that mostly undermines the elements that made this series so great. Don't get me wrong, the courses are still neat. They're mapped from actual mountains and touched up by the development team for added flavor. But I don't know who thought it was a good idea to throw in those god awful pits of death. Yeah, you read it right...pits. Of. Death. You fall in them, you have to restart. Sure, there's a new rewind feature to remedy your often accidental plunges into doom, but it's shoddy and is a total last-resort method to POSSIBLY put you back into the race. We never had to go through those before. There are also hiccups in the very course designs themselves. It is most noticeable when there is an obstructive object that is hugging a cliff or other sheer vertical face. Numerous times now, I have made a jump off a kicker and landed right into the space between one said object and the cliff, stuck, and being forced purely because of bad course design to rewind, putting myself in a bad position because other riders are not affected by this action. You lose points, you lose time, you lose the chance to rectify a mistake you often have little control in avoiding; all when you use the rewind function. Sure, it helps in some cases, but it's almost always detrimental. Which compounds the frustration that smacks you in the face at almost all times. Graphically, it's just what you need from a snowboarding game of present; it runs at a steady thirty frames-per-second, there are lots of neat particles and convincing snow effects, character design is pretty good and is perhaps the only way the characters stand out from each other, and lighting is solid. But you won't get graphical achievements here. Audio is good in almost every way. The soundtrack is a redeeming quality for the game, with a varied but contemporary offering of electro-pop, dubstep, hip-hop, and other popular genres of music of the times. They're modified depending on your tricking performance. When you are in base Tricky! mode (the letters appear in ice-blue on your screen) the infamous Run DmC! track that is now synonymous with the series starts playing. When you pull off another insane combo, you may go into full-on Tricky! mode where the letters are glowing orange. The track at hand takes on a dub-step vibe. As you continue pumping out the big tricks, you keep this sequence going longer. Nothing wrong here. Again, though, there's no lasting quality to the voice acting, which was prevalent in older installments. Gone are the ways of wacky one-liners and stand-up comedy antics from your characters. Sure, they each have their own signature move, but that's it. The helicopter pilots are simply there to commend you, guide you, or give you obvious pointers as to your progress (you're the champion, hehe!). In-between important runs and the changing of mountains, cut-scenes that overview what is to come are narrated by an anonymous voice that won't bore you, but won't invigorate you either. Where's the fun factor, yet? To begin the end, I have to say I was highly disappointed with this game. Each time I play a run with the many pits of death to be encountered, I think, "these guys shouldn't make an SSX game ever again", and I stand by it even twenty-minutes after my last playthrough. Whoever thought they were a good idea needs to go back to the drawing board and try again. They're not fun, they're just a detriment. They're fine in a game like Jet Moto, since they're actually advertised in those games; but here, they slow you down or completely kill an otherwise blast of a game. If they scrapped that crap altogether, this would be a monumental title for current gamers to enjoy. And if they included more interaction and more fun, and if it took itself less seriously then it would be doubly more enjoyable. As it stands, though, it's an exercise in tedium and frustration, which is unlike anything in the series before it. Too much trial and error, and too little sheer fun (think SSX Tricky and 3), makes Jack a dull boy.… Expand

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3. Leemondelicious

   3

   This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. As a huge fan of SSX and Tricky, I was very much looking forward to the reboot of SSX. I hate to admit to being disappointed, but that would be the nicest way to sum up my feelings regarding this game. After the tutorials and the first mountain series, I was cautiously optimistic I may enjoy it. Sure, the controls are VERY fidgety, and I told myself I would just need time getting used to it's sluggishness and unresponsive feel. I even enjoyed the first Deadly Descent. It was only then that everything started getting a little complex. The wing suit. The armour. The weather suit. The polarised lenses. All of these upgrades and add-ons which try to add an element of strategy and variety to preceedings - which is simply NOT what SSX is about or what SSX needs. For me, the joy of SSX in it's glorious early years was the brilliance of it's level design, the simplicity and fluidity of the controls and the gameplay. SSX used to make you WORK for your points and your combos, whereas now it is a veritable eyesore of mapped out jump ramps, endless amounts of grind rails (where you don't even have to balance on) and a trick control system which is just too unresponsive, over-populated and no longer engaging. Couple these faults with the frustrations within the game - the constant failure of the level design forcing you to plunge down invisible crevices to your untimely demise, the most pointless rewind facility in the history of video game design where YES, you can rewind your progress mid-event to correct your mistake but the AI opponents CONTINUE down the mountain (which completely belittles the reasoning behind a rewind system), the dreadful attempt at a story, the missed opportunities to create a world where you are encouraged to go off-piste and discover new locations, the constant infuriation of RiderLog telling me to make friends with random people just because their time was within 0.1 seconds of mine on any given event - put them all together and SSX smacks of "missed opportunity". Perhaps my biggest frustration, however, is the end series of the World Tour. I know EA have a tendency to make short games - I was there for the full 4 hours SP campaign in Medal Of Honour, I was there for the 3.5 hour campaign of Battlefield 3 and by-God I was there for the 2 hour and 2 minutes it took me to finish Need For Speed The Run, but SSX can be gobbled up in 3 hours comfortably with the exception of the last mountain where the game goes on a difficulty spike so sharp, it can only be explained by the developers realising how short it was and they just didn't want you to finish it that quickly. As much as my love for old-school SSX continues (indeed I dusted off my original Xbox for a bout of Tricky earlier today), EA have dropped a howler with this reboot. For those who never experienced the originals - it might have something here to satisfy. To anyone who knows and loves SSX from time-gone-by, prepared to be sorely disappointed. Which is a real, real shame.… Expand

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     4 of 6 users said yes

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