Dark Summit

"A snowboarding game. With a story. How novel."

The flurry of snow-based gaming keeps on continuing on PS2 after the success of the two SSX games, with the disastrous Jonny Mosely Mad Trix, Shaun Palmer Pro Snowboarder and this, the genre-blurring Dark Summit. While Mr Mosely's effort is the video game equivalent of waiting for a bus, fortunately THQ's Dark Summit fares considerably better in al respects.

It was never going to be easy releasing a snowboarding game to compete with the very mighty SSX Tricky, and it's to the developer's credit that THQ hasn't even bothered trying. Instead of a predictable and inferior clone, it's come up with something sufficiently different to demand serious consideration. Like, a plot.
It turns out that harmful pollutants are being dumped on a popular ski resort, sections of which have been sealed off by security chief O'Leary, who presumably moved into the slope protection game following his sacking by Leeds United (one for the football connoisseurs). Your character, Naya, is sent in to investigate, revealing a disturbing alien connection and a possible military cover-up. It's formulaic X-Files stuff and never really grips, but it binds together the series of stunt-based challenges well and provides that little extra incentive to keep you playing.

Out on the slippery stuff it's hard not to be impressed. Each course is absolutely huge, there's very little glitching, and the challenges are sufficiently varied to ensure longevity is not a problem. You begin the game at the lowest section of the mountain, First Cut, where the aim is to complete the first set of nine missions to gain ski lift points that will deliver Naya to a different section of slope. All challenges must be completed before progression is allowed, while at the same time you need to pull off as many tricks as possible to gain experience points. Once you manage to rack up a sufficient amount of experience points, new boards and designer outfits start coming your way.

The problem is that it's not entirely clear where you're supposed to be heading - especially troublesome when the courses are as big as those featured in Dark Summit. Often it's difficult to locate the checkpoints where challenges are issued, so it becomes a test within itself to find them, while other times I found myself inadvertently skiing right past areas where a certain task had to be performed. The 'Jump the Snowplough' mission, for example, took a great deal of exploration and several restarts before I could complete it successfully. This leads to a great deal of frustration at times and would appear to be easily remedied with a tweaking of the radar, which at present doesn't really appear to serve any particular function.

More worthy of the praise is the trick system, joyously simple to get the grips with thanks to the simplistic three-button arrangement. An assortment of grabs, flips and grinds are easily executed (each accompanied by a helpful sound cue which lets you know the move has been performed correctly) along with a sizeable array of special tricks. Only a handful of these are accessible from the start; others must be collected along the way, and are performed by a variety of button combinations. the tricks themselves range from the spectacular to the downright preposterous, and are an excellent way of showing off your digital snowboarding skills to your pet dog.

Diversity comes in the form of multiplayer modes, which offer a number of different challenges for two players, but it's unlikely you'll be frequenting this particular area of the game too often. The recent Shaun Palmer Pro Snowboarder brought some genuine innovation to the genre with its brilliant multiplayer games. In comparison, the multiplayer element of Dark Summit comes across as something of an afterthought. Wrecking Ball and Race to the Bottom are almost entirely devoid of interest and challenge, while the requisite Half Pipe Battle offers nothing I haven't seen many times before.

Visually, Dark Summit is a tad hit and miss. Each of the courses are suitably huge and well varied in terms of design and color palette (surprising for a snow-based game), and there's plenty of scope for stunts at regular intervals. The characters are animated realistically, although their clichéd voices soon begin to irritate, the physics are well tuned, and the whole thing moves along at a commendable swiftness. The scenery destruction is a great idea as well; hit a snowman and his torso will come rolling down the slopes, smash through the electrified fences and they'll come crashing down behind you. it's all good stuff, but not exactly what you'd call spectacular. placed alongside SSX Tricky (the benchmark title), Dark Summit looks woefully inferior.

But I still had fun on the polluted slopes. it's not without its imperfections and I'd still much rather play Tricky, but you can't fault the developer for attempting something different. And at a time when most games offer little more than an evening's entertainment, it's refreshing to note that Dark Summit's stern challenge will last considerably longer. Almost a 7, but not quite.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/02/03, Updated 01/02/03