SSX
Developer: EA Canada
Publisher: EA Sports
Released: February 28th, 2012
PS3/XBOX360
For
me, sports games are like Guitar Hero games: I’ve played them occasionally over
the years, I’ve liked some, I’ve hated some, but I’ve never personally owned
one. The list of sports and sports-related games I’ve played is actually fairly
substantial given the circumstances, but as a child of the 90s the ones that
really made an impression were universally extreme sports games (and Mario
Power Tennis). Games like the Tony Hawk series (Underground was my favourite,
but Pro Skater is getting the HD treatment soon), assorted racing games in
which things explode, and- stop me if I get nostalgic- 1080 Snowboarding for
the Nintendo 64. Sing the character select screen music with me! “Work your
body w-work your body! Work you body w-work your body! (GET DOWN!) W-w-w-w-w-w (PUSH
IT OUT! WOO!)” ((A quick check of YouTube has revealed 1080 sucked, but as a
kid I thought it was the shit, so shut up))
So when I downloaded the SSX demo, it tweaked a part of my brain that has been thoroughly ignored by my normal go-to games. The path to winning in SSX isn’t over the corpses of racist teenagers, robots, dragons, or guys who look vaguely different than I do. In fact, unless somebody falls into a big hole and forgets which button rewinds time, nobody dies at all in SSX! How novel.
Story
I’m sure it plays better if you’ve been a
fan since the first SSX came out in 2000, but the gist of the story is as
follows: Team SSX (Snowboarding, Surfing, and Motocross, if memory serves) has
fallen on hard times. Former friend Griff Simmons has left the team and taken
most of their sponsors with him, forcing them to turn to their fans for
support. SSX co-founder Zoe Payne has a plan though: the team is going to
travel to 9 mountain ranges around the world and conquer the unconquerable ‘Deadly
Descent’ at each one, broadcasting the feats online to pump up their fans and
outshine Griff. The only problem is, Griff has the same idea and he’s already
one step ahead...
The story isn’t going to win any awards,
but the presentation sure might. As you enter each region, Zoe will introduce
you to the hazards you’ll face and which SSX member you’ll be facing them with.
The videos do a great job of capturing the scale and feel of each mountain
range, and the final reveal of what makes each descent so darn deadly is always
cool. Less successful are the motion comics that you unlock with each new SSX
boarder. While they’re meant to fill out the backstory on each character, they
mostly boil down to well-drawn rehashes of the same two or three character
types. This guy needs to see how far he can push himself (the way to find out,
the comic suggests, is by wrapping yourself in body armor and getting hit by a
semi truck), that girl loves extreme sports but snowboarding is the best, this
girl is bubbly and loves danger, etc... They’re not bad, just not quite as
interesting as they think they are.
Gameplay
The
game locks off all the good stuff until you’ve done two short-ish tutorials, the
first of which throws you out of a helicopter thousands of metres above a
mountain range to teach you how to dougie get you acquainted with the air
controls. You can opt to use either buttons or the right thumbstick to start
various grabs, and the game will ask which you’d prefer to see prompts for
during the tutorial. Personally I went for the face buttons, as I tried the
whole ‘stick’ control scheme with Skate 3 and my guy ate a lot of pavement. A
medically unsafe amount of pavement. But that’s because I suck, not because the
controls don’t work, so pick your poison I guess and try them both to see what
works for you. Both control sets are always available so there’s no digging
through menus to swap them out, you can just yell at the buttons and leave them
for the thumbstick halfway down a mountain. After the air tutorial you get a
quick ground run to try out your new moves and then it’s off to wreck up some
powder. If you really want something different, you CAN go digging in some
menus and set the control scheme to ‘Classic’. I didn’t take to them personally
as I have no allegiance to ‘tradition’ in gaming, but if you liked it the old
way then SSX has you covered.
In addition to your movement and trick buttons, you get a few other abilities: You can hold down the left trigger to grind environmental hazards such as trees and ridges, you hold the right trigger to use your boost, and you can rewind time if you fling yourself off a cliff by holding the left bumper/L1 button. Rewinding time costs you valuable points and doesn’t stop the clock during races, so use it sparingly. In addition, while doing tricks you can hold down the right trigger to ‘Tweak’ them, which makes you pull cooler moves and nets you tons of points. Whenever you fill your boost gauge you enter ‘Tricky’ mode, which gives you infinite boost and allows you to pull EVEN MORE SICK MOVES. Hold down the left and right trigger while doing a grab in Tricky mode to pull the most insane stuff you’ve ever seen- and if you fill your Tricky bar you’ll enter Super Tricky. Pulling both triggers while busting a grab in Super Tricky will perform your ‘Signature Move’, which I’m sure I don’t need to tell you is worth more points than you thought possible. You’ll see.
Each character has a set of stat bonuses that affect their Speed, Boost, Tricks, and effectiveness with particular kinds of gear. Each Deadly Descent will require a specific piece of equipment to properly survive, such as the wingsuit, O2 tank, armor, and pulse goggles. In World Tour mode you’ll automatically acquire the necessary gear, but you can buy better pieces with the credits you earn for finishing runs and pulling tricks. You can also buy ‘Mods’ to increase your speed, boost, and more. Each mod lasts for as long as you remain on the same run, even through multiple restarts and finishes, and you can change your equipment at any time before you start moving down the slopes.
I’ll get right to the nut though, so here goes: I love how this game plays. The controls are tight, responsive, and it feels good to hold a trick until the last minute without bailing. Grinding is satisfying, the air is awesome, what more do you want?
Multiplayer
In
addition to the ‘World Tour’ mode you also get ‘Explore’ mode. In Explore you
can race or trick every drop in the game, although some courses you will have
to pay to unlock using your hard-earned credits. As you post times and high
scores, your friends can challenge your ‘Ghost’ to try and set the new record. The
ghost is a recording of their best run, or your personal best if you’re top
dog, and it leaves a glowing trail down the mountain so you can see which way
your friend went. You’ll receive a decent amount of cash for beating a friend
on a run, and even more if they fail to beat you later. The ghost system is an
excellent example of asynchronous multiplayer and already I’ve dumped hours of
my life into topping a buddy’s time. (As of this writing, I beat his last time
by 7 hundredths of a second and it’s already an incredibly fast run at a minute
and seventeen seconds. He’s going to KILL me.) This is supplemented by ‘SSX
Radio’, which is in essence a ‘Cross-Match Voice Chat’ for groups of friends,
like a Ventrilo server for snowboarders. This means you can talk shit to your
friends when you’re both playing SSX, even if (and here comes the elephant in
the room) you can’t actually directly play competitive multiplayer with each
other.
Yeah, it sucks. You can’t set up a private run with just you and your buddies, you have to race their ghost. No choice, no option, nothing. You cannot both be in the same race at the same time against each other. It’s a big omission, nearly a deal breaker, but believe me when I say that the Explore mode and the RiderNet system do an incredible job of making it up to you. You won’t really miss it in the end, at least not as much as you might think. Would it still be nice? Yeah. But you can’t have everything. Speaking of RiderNet, it’s basically the AutoLog from Need For Speed rebranded and cleaned up. It tracks all of your friends and keeps you updated on their progress in Explore, letting you know when and where you got your butt whooped and how much you’ll get for going back and setting the record straight. RiderNet is one of those features you didn’t know you wanted until you got it, and you found out what you were missing.
Finally, there are Global Events. Global Events are large time-sensitive competitions bearing huge prize pools with thousands upon thousands of players competing for a piece of the action. The credits you can win are determined by how well you do: if you score high enough you’ll be placed in specific ‘brackets’ that are awarded a percentage of the money. The bar for entry into the highest brackets is typically unreasonable, but that’s what it takes to score millions on a single run. The events with the most tempting honey pots typically charge a large fee for entering, so take care and make sure you’re not about to blow 200k on a race you can’t win.
Graphics
This
game is gorgeous. If it were a lady, all the boy games would fall over
themselves to court her. Every run has a distinct look and feel, the atmosphere
of each mountain range is spot-on, and there is basically nowhere on these
courses you can’t go. When somebody says they want to see a classic they loved
brought into the HD generation, they don’t mean ‘Slap some Anti-Aliasing on it
and clean up two or three textures’, they mean SSX. It’s sharp, quick, varied,
and full of personality. The frame rate is smooth as silk as well with not even
a hint of slowdown when things get hairy. Seriously, this game is phenomenally
put together.
Sound
As
a direct result of this soundtrack I am now a fan of like eight bands/artists I
didn’t listen to before. It’s got upbeat, fun tracks, and it’s got some great
moody material for the night-time runs through Siberia and a live volcano
inside Kilimanjaro. Everything is crisp, it sounds amaaaaazing in surround
sound, and the effects are killer. The game remixes the music based on your
performance, dropping it out when you hit big air and throwing in ‘It’s Tricky’
when you hit Tricky mode. You can customize the soundtrack to your liking, and
even add your own music to races and menus. It’s hard to describe it without hearing
it, but they’ve done a top-notch job here. Just... make sure you can at least
tolerate dubstep first, because there’s a lot of it. A lot, a lot.
Wrap-Up
As
somebody who wasn’t really a fan of this kind of game until SSX, I’ve been
hard-pressed to explain what drew me to it. Ultimately, I believe the quality
of the presentation is what sold me on the game, and the robust multiplayer
options overcome the lack of direct competition to keep the game in rotation
long after many others have fallen. I myself balked considerably at paying $60
for it, given the odds of a price drop sometime in the future, but ultimately
it’s well worth the price of admission with the replay and production value EA
Canada has built in. And guys, if this hits even $50, pick it up, it’s a load
of fun.
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