Game Review: SSX

I don't think I can reasonably claim to be the extreme sporting type. When I was a kid I had a skateboard that my cousins and I would use to luge down my parents’ driveway, but at present the most extreme activity I partake in is driving a few miles over the speed limit. 

It’s not that I don’t like extreme sports; I watch the Winter Olympics and the X-Games most years. It’s just that I’ve never been one for putting life and limb on the line for cheap thrills. A rollercoaster serves that purpose well enough for me, or indeed playing a game where I’m allowed to simulate some fool putting his life on the line etc. 

So if you haven’t heard or guessed at this point, SSX is a game about extreme sports. More specifically, it’s about extreme winter sports depicted in a very exaggerated action film style. I guess the developers thought that hurling oneself off the side of a mountain and sliding between jagged rocks and massive pitfalls on a plastic board wasn’t quite extreme enough.    

Still, it makes no claims of being realistic and doesn’t try to pass itself off that way, so I can respect EA for that. So without further ado, let’s hurl ourselves into SSX.

Plot and Characters

The game keeps the plot nice and simple. Not the Capcom or Namco kind of simple, though, where the storyline is a steaming pile of literary vomit; no, the plot of SSX was enough to make me shrug my shoulders and say, “ok, works for me.” 

You play as nine members of Team SSX (Snowboard, Surf, Motocross), a team of extreme sportsmen who have set up what they call the Deadly Drops Tour.  The tour will take them to the nine deadliest mountains in the world, and each member of the team must conquer one of the deadly drops. 

There’s also the rival, Griff, who was originally a member of team SSX but deserted to do the tour on his own and hog all the glory. With Griff went most of Team SSX’s funding, so they set up a live stream to encourage their fans to donate money and help them complete the tour.

As for the characters, they don’t have a lot of personality about them. The leader of Team SSX is Zoe, and she’ll be the first character you play as. You’ll complete the first deadly drop as her, and as the game progresses you’ll play as her when she initiates new members to the team. 

Other than that, they’re just faces. There’s a little comic book-style cutscene plonked on for each one of them which briefly explains via textbox where they come from and why they’re competing with Team SSX, but each one is just a slapdash variant of “because I have to live life to the extreme” and all that noise. It doesn’t matter, anyway. They’re all going to be your playthings to toss off of cliffs anyway.

Gameplay

You have dozens slopes to choose from spanning across nine different regions. Trust me, there’s plenty of variety to keep the game fresh in the face of the old problem of extreme sports-type games becoming very repetitive very quickly. 

Each of the nine regions features a unique variable which makes it more challenging. The first deadly drop requires your character to wear protective armor as she’ll be snowboarding through a dense forest. Another has your character use a wing suit to clear massive gaps on the way down the mountain, and another still has your character periodically breathe condensed oxygen from a tank to keep from blacking out. 

Gameplay itself is broken into two main choices, though there are minor variables tossed in throughout the game. The two main choices are racing and trick attack.  Racing should be obvious enough, assuming you’re not brain-dead: get to the bottom of the mountain the fastest. Trick attack should be fairly obvious as well: obtain the most points from performing stunts before you reach the end of your run. 

As I said before, the stunts themselves are absurdly exaggerated, so leaping 200 meters into the air and performing a 2,700 Tweak Indy won’t be a rare occurrence but rather your main means of obtaining the much-coveted boost that you’ll need to win races.

Boost is just as it sounds; it makes your rider go much faster down the slopes.  You get boost by performing stunts and boarding over the flares left on the ground to mark the optimum path down the mountain. If you manage to fill the boost meter you’ll enter Tricky mode, which will grant you infinite boost for about ten seconds. Your rider will also perform more complex stunts during this mode.

During the aforementioned ten seconds you’ll have the chance to build the Tricky meter to max, which will enter what I guess is Super Tricky mode. Once you enter this mode, you’ll still have unlimited boost, but you’ll also have access to your rider’s unique stunt which will give you huge bonuses. You can also extend the life of your Super Tricky mode by continuing to perform outrageous stunts. 

As you complete challenges you’ll earn experience point which you can spend on various upgrades and better gear. You can also spend it on new clothes, but unless it offers some sort of bonus to your traits there’s hardly any point to it. 

Something worth noting: SSX has gone the way of Facebook and smartphone games in that victory is not something that has to be earned when it can be bought. There’s an option to shell out more money for experience-points packages which was included in the noble name of EA trying to squeeze as much money as possible out its clientele. 

Multiplayer

No split screen this time, but you can play online. You can compete in the various challenges that the campaign offers as well as create your own. There’s not much more to say than that, really. I don’t know if it’s more difficult than the campaign since the race times and point counts of the A.I. are artificially produced instead of the A.I. having to actually earn them like you do. 

Overall

I actually quite liked SSX. It’s colorful and exaggerated and fun. It’s certainly the closest I ever want to get to leaping off of Mount Everest and careening down the side of it at 100 miles per hour. I think I’ll stick to obstacle courses for my extreme fun. 

Investment suggestion: As much as I like it, you should definitely rent it.  There’s only about a week’s worth of gameplay in it. The multiplayer offers minor tweaks, but I just don’t see it having the sort of lasting appeal that would make it worth $60.    

The above is only my opinion. It just happens to be right. 

Where to Purchase

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