Game Reviews
Review: Shaun White Snowboarding
By Sean Booker November 27, 2008 - 14:00
Studios: Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher(s): Ubisoft
Rating: T
Genre: Sports (Snowboarding)
Platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PSP, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, PC
Players: 1-16 Simultaneous
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 lousy experience. This game does a sad job of making
you really feel like you’re flying down the slopes thanks to shoddy
controls and bad physics. The game was an overall let down and won’t
make you want to continue with it.
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 to enjoy.
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. You'll also need to use the right trigger for
most of your stunts, as it is the jump button – but 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 braking so your character can
get more height. All this does is slow you down, meaning you can’t do as
many tricks because you don’t have as much air time as you would have if you didn’t have to brake. Another weird thing is that, while on the ground,
the right analog stick turns your
board. If you don’t have any speed, or aren’t landing from
a jump, this does nothing but help you slow down (now giving us 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. When you are grinding on 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 unbelievably difficult to pull off if you’re just
starting out, which ups the learning curve quite a bit.
The
gameplay 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 pointless. You’re
some new hotshot 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. Your search for this next set will test your ability to use the newly acquired 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 quickly. But there
are a few times that you will find yourself really flying, which is a
great feeling. 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.
The
graphics in
Shaun White Snowboarding aren’t bad. They do a decent job of recreating a mountain-scape, atmosphere included.
I generally found the area I was boarding down rather nice to look at, but I was confused by the character models. I was quite torn about how
I felt about them. Normally they looked okay, but that was because I was always
looking at my guy from the back. Actually, the only aesthetic I didn’t like
in this game was the character faces. I think Shaun White’s
character in the game was incredible ugly and almost looked like something out of a last-gen game, at least when it came to his face.
My
favourite part about the game was the music line up. It did a good
job of incorporating old pop/classic rock
with some new age hits. Though,
there’s no way of choosing which songs you want to listen
to out of the selection you have. You can’t make a playlist of your
favourites.
However, you can use the music you already have on your Xbox 360 or compatible music device (also works with Playstation 3 version) and play that through the Dashboard (or Guide) and it will integrate the music into the game. Your music will then sound like it was from the original track list as all the normal snowboarding sounds you make (eg. grunts or grinding noises) will be heard normally above it. The one downside to this is that you can't go through your music using the game's quick menu D-pad set up like you can with the game's original song selection. You must go into the Xbox 360's Guide and select the specific song/playlist you want.
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 happen to 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.