Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding

"A good, but difficult at times, snowboarding game."

This is my first review, so bare with me. I'm writing this review due to small number of reader reviews, and especially the one that bashes it for what appears to be a lack of understanding. (Maybe an inability to read the game manual?)

Gameplay: 9/10
Controls: 8/10

Bought this game along with Halo and DOA3, both games which you could pretty much just pick up and play, barring that you have experience with games like them, or the previous version. So, when I slapped in Amped and I bailed, and bailed, and bailed... I was disappointed.

But I kept trying. I knew the game didn't suck, because many of the reviews were pretty good, I knew I was doing something wrong. So I tried a little more, and I got pretty good. But, doing what I was doing only got me to the third course, and not any further.

At that point, I read a bit of the manual, and realized that I'm trying to play this game like Tony Hawk. The triggers are NOT for turning. The triggers are for tweaking tricks. After training myself not to play with the triggers, it got decidedly easier.

At first the weird controls seemed strange, but the right joystick controling grabs is really sweet. Doing combos is really simple once you get used to just rotating the stick, and tweaking them with the left/right triggers. Spinning and Flipping takes some used to, because you have to time your spins properly. The boarder whips his body around just like real snowboarding.

It's complicated at first, but in an hour or two you'll be grabbing media points like nothing.

The entire game is based around five things: High Score, Media Points, Sponsor, Pro Boarder, and Exploring. Every level you have to get a certain high score, simple. Then, if you trick in front of cameras you get more points that count towards your media score. Depending on how well you did, you can open up a Sponsor level, and in that level you have to do tricks the Sponsor likes in order to raise his excitment level until the end.

Pro is unlocked later on and you simply have to follow a pro boarder and beat tricks he does off of ramps and rails. Exploring, I dont quite understand yet, but what I do understand is that you have to search out for these snowmen, and when you destroy them you get them checked off your list. Just like money icons in Tony Hawk 2, I guess.

Along the way you get more clothes and gear, which there is an overabundance of. We're talking 50 different styles of jackets. It's crazy. But, it's worth fighting for.

Graphics: 10/10

The only snowboarding game I've ever really played was 1080 on the N64. I had Coolboarders 3 for PSX but I only played it once. I thought it was terrible, the snow felt all hard, and it was just odd. 1080 had a very soft feel. I wont ever understand how games can pull off a very snowy and soft feel, but 1080 did it perfectly.

Amped is even better. The different types of snow feel amazing, and they look amazing. I really appreciate the fact that Amped's mountains are based on real mountains. They're simply gorgeous. You can see just about everything in all directions. Far away small snowboarder's powder flying in the air.

My favorite graphical thing is the fact that the snow sticks to your board and trails off realisticly depending on how deep the snow you were in was. It's a simply beautiful game, despite the fact that after a while the model animations gets repetitive.

Sides from that, everything is perfect in this game. A few bugs here and there when you smack the base of a rail the wrong way, etc, and sometimes the falling snow effect looks odd. Otherwise, it's perfect, and it's worth getting good at the gameplay just to show your friends the graphics properly.

Sound: 10/10

Amped boasts around 100 different sounds on it's soundtrack. It's a major plus for buying, considering I'm sure we've all grown tired of the same songs in Tony 2/3 playing over and over again. And, better yet, Amped's songs are the typical Rock Top 40 you'll hear on your local radio station every time you take a break from playing.

Amped's soundtracks tap indie labels for artists that are not only good, but sometimes better than big name artists. I have yet to hear the same song twice in my two hours of playing, and I haven't heard a bad song really, except for the occasional soft electronic song ending and being immediately replaced by a hard and heavy thrasing Punk song.

Even then, if you don't like their selection of music, rip some CDs to the Harddrive through the XBox's system menu, and they'll appear in your Amped Soundtrack listing. It's really simple, and you can play your game to all Nine Inch Nails if it makes you feel good... Or, just let the game mix your artists in with theirs.

The in game sound is equally splendid. Everything sounds right, from carving down the mountain, to the camera men heckling you when you screw up. The only complaint is the menu sound gets annoying after a long play period.

Multiplayer: 5/10

Multiplayer is pretty lousy. As far as I could find there is no split-screen mode. Just a turn based High Score mode, and it's pretty lousy unless you have two fiercly competitive people going against each other. This doesn't substract from the full score really because it's so much fun in just single player.

Final Thoughts:

Amped is a really great game for anyone who has an XBox. If you have one and you don't have Amped, you're missing out. And, if you have it, and don't give it a proper chance, you're really missing out on the pure beauty of pulling off your first really perfect run.

The replay feature's cameras could be a bit better, but the XBox hard-drive makes me eager to save my replays, where as I was always deleting my Tony Hawk replays to make room for save games.

But, that's it. Buy Amped, enjoy it. Halo ain't half bad either. I'm happy with my purchase, and so are all my friends, haha.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/30/01, Updated 12/30/01