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SSX 3
- November 14, 2003 12:05 PM PST
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The popular snowboarding franchise returns but leaves innovation and variety buried in the snow.
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Don?t Believe the Hype (It?s a Sequel)
SSX3 features 10 selectable characters for its main career mode, where you?ll compete to earn improved stats and souped-up gear. The focus is still on tricks with new combos and a three-tiered Uber trick system to put the flow in your snow. In fact, despite hype suggesting otherwise, SSX3?s only significant difference from its predecessor, SSX Tricky, is solely cosmetic: Instead of multiple locations, all 12 tracks are located on one mountain featuring super-pipes, race tracks, and ramp-frenzied slopes. Unfortunately, this greatly reduces opportunities for eye candy variety.
Guns or Grinds?
The fluid, mostly 3D visuals convey relentless speed and stomach-churning heights as your polygonal snowboarders streak across gorgeous vistas. The graphics do hit a couple of icy patches, though: Depth is hard to judge, and sometimes your character glitches in a staccato freeze when taking off in the half-pipe. That occasional hiccup also affects control precision, which is already off-balance from inconsistent collision detection and some course-edge blunders that can blind or strand your ?boarder. These are minor problems, however, compared to the mind-numbing frustration of the A.I.?s catch-up programming, which makes your opponents inexplicably faster when you?re ahead in the last legs. The mixed bag continues in the audio department, where the seven original songs win points for novelty but sound garbled and quickly became repetitive. The sound effects, which are more akin to gunfire than a board cutting through snow, are a whiteout too.
SSX3?s role-playing elements, variety of challenges, and speedy, kinetic thrills make it worth a ride, but its shortcomings might make you pass up the ski lift after just a couple trips.
