X-Bladez: Inline Skater

"Another terrible extreme sports game"

Everyone has jumped on the extreme sports market lately, and many companies are trying to feed off the popularity of others, which is the exact function this games serves. If any of you have played Tony Hawk, Dave Mirra or any other moderately competent extreme sports title, then look away now. This game will offer you nothing but comic relief, and that is not even worth the $10 you will waste on it. Now for the rest of you...hey, where did everyone go?
That is the problem; you can buy Tony Hawk for $20 new or get any other extreme sports game and you will find that they offer so much more than this sorry excuse for a game. Even razor freestyle scooter blows this stinker out of the water! Don't believe me? Do you remember that string of Xtreme titles a few years ago? You know, 2Xtreme and 3Xtreme, which were both boring downhill races with no depth. Well, those are significantly better than XBladez. Significantly.

Graphics & Sound
The graphics are very poor as you might imagine. The weird looking, blocky characters are cel-shaded and look more like the fighters from Virtua Fighter Kids, which is not a complement. The environments lacked places to perform tricks and outlandish stunts, which marrs the game further. On the plus side, the levels were differet from each other and allowed for a lot of variety, but that was simply not enough. The sound consists of annoying repetitive music, while the sound is surprisingly good. Imagine Tony Hawk sounds and you are just slightly overestimating the sounds involved in XBladez. Form thuds to gorans to crashes, they are all here. Unfortunately, that was not enough to get this section anywhere near a high score.
Audio & Video - 3.5/10

Gameplay
Now here is where the bulk of the mistakes take place. Your basic objective is to skate around performing as many of the 18 tricks that you can in order to get the required number of points in the time limit. Unfortunately, this is very hard to do due to the poor controls and limited tricks. I think the idea was to create a more child friendly version of Tony Hawk, but it is not even very easy, even for experienced gamers. At least in Tony Hawk you could hurt your character; now you just get a childish yelp from messing up. I would have liked more variety between the characters, but annoyingly all the characters can pull off the same 15 or 16 moves, and the only difference between them are their 2 special moves.
Gameplay - 5/10

Overall
Overall, this is a very poor game that does not even deserve a rental. This is just another attempt to lure customers into wasting money by jumping onto a hot trend and sporting a cheap price. Do not be fooled, or you will be sorry.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 08/09/03