Shaun White Snowboarding Review
A Review - By Steve Heller
The sun is rising, creating a golden glow across the white landscape. The frost begins to melt as the crisp air fills your lungs, you look to your right and see three of your best mates cheering you on. There is no going back now. You pick up speed, you hit the slope at the exact moment, and pull off an impressive double backflip before eating it on the landing. Welcome to a new day in Shaun White Snowboarding.
Shaun White offers a more realistic approach to snowboarding than previous titles in the genre such as the SSX franchise, which is a welcomed change. You create a character who then meets up with Shaun White on the slopes. He thinks you have style and flare and with his help you can make it to the big leagues. He then introduces you to his crew, who are all a little out there which is great and they are genuinely funny characters. There are a series of mountains or "areas" where you must collect three tokens to complete the game. It's a fairly standard mechanic for these sorts of games, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Ultimately it works well and with the seemingly endless challenges you will have to complete along the way, it is going to take you some time to collect all of the tokens anyway.
So then you set off to have free reign of the game world. This is the beauty of SW - there's a huge map for you to explore. There are no boundaries and this is where the game excels. It's the little things that makes you appreciate the time that developers have put into this title. You will soon learn that chairlifts become your new best friend and it's a great way to check out the scenery on your way back up to the top of the mountains.
The control scheme is slick, but will take some time to getting used to. The R2 button controls your "ollie" with the left stick controlling spins and the right controlling grabs. When first getting on the board you are bound to eat it several times, but once you learn the basics, you will be pulling off backflips in no time! It's all about timing in SW, and once you have the timing down you will be unstoppable.
SWs multiplayer is where the game truly shines. Similar setup to Burnout, multiplayer is simply accessed by using the D-pad anytime in the single player game. Meet up with a bunch of mates and you can complete challenges together, or even just board around and explore and just chill out. This is where you will spend most of your time with Shaun White, exploring the mountains and just running amok with your friends is far more entertaining that the single player experience, which isn't a bad thing at all.
Also the tricks seem a little too easy to land once you get the hang of the controls. I would have liked to see a progressive learning curve like in Skate, that game had you for hours learning to pull off a certain combo, but once you had it down, it seemed like you achieved something. SW just seems too easy to land all those tricks and combos for a snowboarding simulation game.
SW is running on the Assassins Creed engine so we already know that is should look pretty, and it does. The slopes look fantastic, splashed with the colours of other boarders, trees and the sunsets look amazing. Draw distance is fantastic, it seems like you can see all the way down the mountain at times, and it does it all without slowing down one bit. Character models could do with a little more detail, but all in all the graphics fit the game perfectly.
Extreme Sport games demand an extreme sports soundtrack, and Shaun White delivers across all fronts. Featuring a huge lineup spanning across multiple genres this is sure to have a few songs you can sing along to. With all this music blearing though it can be hard to heard the rest of the game, but the snow crunching effects, wind effects and banter between other boarders all sound great. This game delivers an above average audio experience.
This is largely dependant on if you have access to the online component of the game. While if you are compelled to complete all the challenges and collect all the tokens SW will keep you busy for a long chunk of time, but the real question is do you want to? The single player experience is ok to fill in some time, but more often than not you just aren't compelled to follow it through with the samey challenges time after time. Multiplayer on the other hand opens up a whole other bag of tricks, get some good friends with this game, and it will be a regular spinner in your console of choice.
The Final Verdict
Shaun White is an ambitious title, and takes some giant leaps in the right direction, but has dropped some substance along the way. While they hit it spot on with the multiplayer experience, the lack of any real learning curve has stripped away a lot of depth from the single player experience. Great visuals and even better sound, this title is definitely worth checking out