Review: SSX on Tour (PS2)

SSX On Tour sees a big change of style for the series, this time set to an all-rock soundtrack. Whether the new music is a good or a bad thing is entirely a matter of opinion, but less so is Gamestyle’s ever-growing realisation that EA have over-egged the SSX pudding. In the words of BB King: "the thrill is gone".

The titular Tour is your boarder's quest from amateur to rock star, which is achieved by competing in official race and slopestyle and unofficial 'shred' challenges. The official bouts are the key to progression and earn you large sums of cash to buy better boards. The optional shred challenges increase your hype (and sometimes earn you bonus silly hats). They're a diverse bunch: requiring you to perform such feats as grind a number of marked rails, grind a set distance, stay in the air for yay seconds at a time, or evade the determined Ski Patrol.

After puzzling over the slightly David Firth-esque scribbly theme of the menus, you'll then have to endure a rather rubbish create-a-character bit before you can hit the slopes. You can choose to create a skier or a boarder, but it makes no difference to the gameplay. Apart from the types of tricks you can perform and the fact that a skier who lands backwards won't automatically turn around, the handling is exactly the same. You're then prompted to choose one of about a dozen whole bodies, which makes no difference either as you're then prompted to set your person's height and mass and choose a face and hairstyle. We'd rather play with one of the charismatic established characters than some anonymous entity made with an engine with far too few permutations to imitate our own faces.

After that, you're thrown straight into a race against SSX veteran Elise. Your victory establishes you as competition material, and from then on you have the run of the mountain. And then it all gets incredibly samey. Gamestyle would never have predicted that we'd find ourselves bored by a game in which one of the bonus challenges is to knock over as many small children as possible, but we did. Some of us preferred the madness of SSX Tricky (particularly the wonderfully-ostentatious human pinball machine that was Tokyo Megaplex), whilst some of us would rather play in the natural splendour that was SSX3. SSX On Tour achieves neither. Everywhere looks the same: the locations are drab and unmemorable, and although there is a myriad of surfaces to grind, jump or handspring off, the actual scenery is bereft of much more than trees and blocky buildings with off-putting pop-up texturing.

After you win a race or slopestyle event, you unlock one or two more. It soon becomes less and less fun as the repetitiveness sinks in, and then the difficulty rises too sharply. You won't ever be stuck on one event and unable to proceed, as should you fail a challenge (whether official or shred) you have the choice of dismissing it rather than having another go. This means, though, that you have to actually play the thing in the first place. And sometimes you'll feel that you really can't be bothered, when you're stuck in the middle of a four-heat event with no chance of winning thanks to the suddenly-elevated AI. EA have gone to the trouble of making event after event after event, but we'd really rather have had a select crafted few than this carry-on.

If you're willing to put in the effort and skill, On Tour can be rewarding. The driving metal songlist often works to great effect to enhance the action. Seeing a message saying 'You ROCK!' is always a confidence booster, and it's quite a thrill successfully landing a long combo grab topped off with a Monster trick. The Monsters are so ludicrously over the top than before that they'd turn the head of the Prince of Persia, and they are accompanied by the silencing of the soundtrack and a (done too often nowadays, but in this case still pretty effective) time-dilating effect. You can also buy huger tricks for inordinate sums of money. The Monsters are enacted by using the right thumbstick whilst in the air. Since there are more possible Monster tricks than directions you can move the stick (it only recognises up, down, left and right), the bigger tricks are pulled off by rapid combos with the stick, but your boarder only pulls off the next stage in the trick if there's enough airtime left, making it fairly hard to wipe out while pulling off a Monster. On the other hand, this does mean that you'll probably find yourself just button-mashing the stick more often than not.

Though it's more frustrating and graphically less splendid than its predecessor, this watered-down version of SSX is still more fun than most other sports games, but until it's bargain-bucket material you'd be far better off with SSX3, or perhaps Amped 3 or Tony Hawk's number however-many-it-is-now.

Rating: 6 / 10

Words by Anna Ghislaine