13 October 2005
SSX On Tour
I'm kind of torn on this game. The level design is quite good and if nothing else I'll get my money's worth just freeriding. The rest is, well, sort of a mess.
The interface sucks and that's not even counting the SUPER MEGA ROCK MONSTER graphic design of it. The game autosaves if you've changed NOTHING but merely looked at an options screen or store. If you turn that off you get asked at least once every 30 seconds and sometimes twice in a row. And you can't just cancel out with triangle like before you have to actually choose "no". The "mixtapes" don't work on the menu screens.
There's no real sense of progression, you just sort of cruise along until you get sponsored and then keep going until you hit semi-pro, etc. without any real idea when it's going to happen again. The board pricing is bizarre, there can be a huge difference between 2 boards that cost almost the same or almost non between ones with $30k difference. There's many fewer clothes and accessories.
I miss the personalities of the riders, all your opponents are just genero-weenies like you. Even though a lot of the voice work has been over the top [especially in Tricky] in the past it at least gave it some personality.
The reduced trick options are a bit of disappointment as well but not a huge one for me. I like racing/freeriding much better anyway. THe only thing I don't like is that you need to do boardpress spam at all times to get your combo multiplier high enougn.
There are definitely improvements, bouncing off an invisible wall is actually preferable to the all too frequent "out of bounds" in SSX3. I like the fact that boosting actually makes a significant difference in speed unlike 3. I'm not sorry I bought this game at all and I'll probably play a lot more but it just feels sort of unfinished.
Basically, if this was the very first SSX game ever I'd love it. The fact is that they've done pretty much every thing better in another previous game which is weird.
The interface sucks and that's not even counting the SUPER MEGA ROCK MONSTER graphic design of it. The game autosaves if you've changed NOTHING but merely looked at an options screen or store. If you turn that off you get asked at least once every 30 seconds and sometimes twice in a row. And you can't just cancel out with triangle like before you have to actually choose "no". The "mixtapes" don't work on the menu screens.
There's no real sense of progression, you just sort of cruise along until you get sponsored and then keep going until you hit semi-pro, etc. without any real idea when it's going to happen again. The board pricing is bizarre, there can be a huge difference between 2 boards that cost almost the same or almost non between ones with $30k difference. There's many fewer clothes and accessories.
I miss the personalities of the riders, all your opponents are just genero-weenies like you. Even though a lot of the voice work has been over the top [especially in Tricky] in the past it at least gave it some personality.
The reduced trick options are a bit of disappointment as well but not a huge one for me. I like racing/freeriding much better anyway. THe only thing I don't like is that you need to do boardpress spam at all times to get your combo multiplier high enougn.
There are definitely improvements, bouncing off an invisible wall is actually preferable to the all too frequent "out of bounds" in SSX3. I like the fact that boosting actually makes a significant difference in speed unlike 3. I'm not sorry I bought this game at all and I'll probably play a lot more but it just feels sort of unfinished.
Basically, if this was the very first SSX game ever I'd love it. The fact is that they've done pretty much every thing better in another previous game which is weird.
