The Snowboarding Sports genre has made a rather sparse and lacklustre appearance on this generation of consoles. It’s been spotted up in the mountains with all the tantalisingly scant frequency of Bigfoot, only to arrive at the gamer-crowded foothills in a snowballed mess. Previous attempts to bring long-lasting entertainment to the genre, then, have been disappointments, tripped-up somewhere along their development tracks on the way to the commercial finishing line.
Shaun White Snowboarding tries hard to remedy this by putting on a good show for the crowd, but it’s ultimately unrewarding and doesn’t provide the complete overhaul of the genre that it promises.
If you’ve played a snowboarding game before, you’ll know what to initially expect. As with Amped 3, released on the Xbox 360 in 2005, Shaun White allows you to customise the look of your rider with a vast selection of brand-name clothing. There’s even the option to unlock Mr. White himself, who makes an extensive appearance in the game, lending his likeness and voice to create a product that’s a worthy extension of his official brand. First impressions are…well, impressive. The Assassin’s Creed engine which powers the game renders the mountain landscapes in a suitably epic and eye-catching fashion. There are four of these to slide down, each with their own distinct look and feel. The puffy snow slopes of the Alps make for some smooth, high-speed action, whereas the dangerously rocky cliffs of inland Japan offer up some risky but rewarding trick opportunities; each mountain range invites you to approach it with a different style of play. On your first few runs, this is an exciting snowboarding experience. You’ll spend these learning and experimenting with the basic controls of the game, enjoying the scenery while you zip down. As this quickly becomes repetitive, you’ll begin to experiment with the game’s supposed multi-linearity, where different and even self-forged routes are available to the keen snowboarder, giving rise to the notion that Shaun White is as much about exploration as it is about pulling off insane tricks.
Here’s where the game, and indeed your rider, falls down. During your descent of the mountain, you’re only given a very small window of opportunity to take a route that leads off-piste. Many of these veer suddenly to the left or right, amongst the trees or closely positioned after a cliff drop or ramp. If you try and take these junctions on a whim, you’ll more often than not overshoot your target and crash, or simply loose control and trip up on a piece of scenery that’s in your way. Because of this, taking these routes is something you have to plan ahead for and not something to tempt your spontaneous decision-making skills, as the game thinks it is. Primarily, it’s the controls and game physics, not the level design, which are to blame. Your rider’s turning circle is far too wide to make these sharp turns, and his speed is affected by the scenery in contradictory ways. For example, even gentle slopes speed him up way more than is realistic, and on flat ground and half-pipes he almost grinds to a halt.
These physics feel as if they’re tailored more to make the game look attractive than play realistically, which is odd given its strong attention to realistic detail. Shaun Rider Snowboarding can’t decide whether it’s a game accurately simulating the natural experience of the sport, or whether it’s a flashy arcade game putting you in the hotseat of thrilling action. On the one hand, it tempts you to use impulsive real-world judgement in deciding where to go, and on the other, it hampers this realistic approach with all manner of gimmicky gameplay add-ons. The most frustrating of these is the option to pick up and throw snowballs in mid-run. This effectively turns a game of pure racing skill into a weapon-based comedy racer. Snowballs come in two varieties: aimed and un-aimed. Aimed snowballs have a high tendency to hit their intended targets. Instead of overtaking another rider, you can just throw one of these to put them off their race. Un-aimed snowballs, while less reliable, can be thrown rapidly, opening the game up with spamming possibilities.
Throwing either kind yourself makes the game cheap and easy, but being on the receiving end of them is just plain infuriating. Although you might make a gentleman’s agreement over Xbox Live to a rule of “no snowballing”, the computer controlled A.I opponents simply cannot be bargained with, and will deploy this underhand tactic whenever they feels is necessary. Another of the game’s features which detracts from its realistic racing is the item collection mode familiar to all extreme sports games. Here, you have to race down the slopes collecting the oversized guitar or coin symbols that appear in snaking columns laid out on the course. This would be fun in an arcade sort of way if the controls weren’t so unresponsive, but since they’re all too often inefficient at providing the quick manoeuvrability required for this sort of mode, it can only be seen as a failure. It shows up the flaws in the game’s attempt to blend sim-like realism with arcade accessibility.
Much like the previous Sports Snowboarding games on Xbox 360, Shaun White Snowboarding is a slick and presentable title on the surface, which doesn’t have the mastery or depth to guarantee long-term entertainment. Furthermore, what attempts the game does make in extending the replay value, such as adding multiple routes in each of the mountain tracks, are curtailed by its insistence in sticking to the old snowboarding formulas. The online versus and group free-snowboarding modes work pretty well, and socialising on the slopes with your friends whilst listening to the expansive and well-chosen licensed soundtrack selection is fun in a relaxing sort of way; there’s bang up-to-date tracks, remixes and classic oldies for your ears to enjoy. If you’re looking for a long-term snowboarding experience that combines the realism of actually being a snowboarder on the slopes with the ability to perform tricks worthy of Shaun White himself, however, this doesn’t quite pull it off. The game is worth a weekend’s rent only, about the same time as an actual trip to your local ski-slope, in fact.
