SSX 3

"Say goodbye to your Free Time"

SSX 3 is a racing game in which you play as one of the racers from the previous SSX games as well as a few newcomers.

Game Play:
Like stated above, you choose which character you want to be then you can immediately go race or enter a trick competition. You can either get to places by using your PDA type device known as the M-COMM or just snowboarding there yourself. What's really impressive is that you can snowboard down the entire mountain without a single load time. And that's a freakin' thirty minute race. Very nice.

While racing you can knock people down for adrenaline. Adrenaline allows you to pull of the really fancy tricks known as the uber tricks as well as give you a speed boost. Doing basic tricks also will give you adrenaline. The tricks are very simple to pull off. Just hold down the left trigger then hit either X, Y, B, or the right trigger to pull of different tricks. Once you've landed atleast four of the uber tricks, you can pull off the really complicated looking tricks that are known as the super uber tricks. They're harder to land because they take such a long time to pull off. But the controls to pull them off are exactly the same.

But anyways, back to racing. When racing you will run into a few annoying things. A lot of the time when you're going fast, it's hard to control where you're going and you'll move a matter of inches off of the intended track and it'll warp you back onto the track, taking your adrenaline with it. This usually also takes you out of first place. But here's my question, if you don't want me going over there, why didn't you just block off the area instead of screwing with me and making me think I have a little more of an open space to ride than I do?

Graphics:
A lot of the character's are a little too cartoony for my liking, but everything else like the environments look great. Very colorful and nice.

Sound:
Sadly, there's no custom soundtrack option for this game, but thankfully the music isn't that bad. Some of it is pretty good actually. It's a very mixed soundtrack, it has: Punk rock, dance, rap, techno, hard rock, stuff like that. So it pretty much has something for everyone in it.

But one very annoying thing about the music while you're riding, it reacts to how you're riding. Sounds interesting, right? It's not. It's very annoying, actually. Run into someone? Music will cut out and it'll just play the same background music part of it. It'd be one thing if it was only for a few seconds, but the music takes forever to come back. Go off a jump? Expect the music to cut out. It's to the point where you won't take the ramp because you know it'll just make the music cut out if you do. However, I have a feeling that this only annoys me because I've never heard anyone else complain about it.

The voice acting is pretty good, nothing over the top or anything like that. It's just right. You also have a DJ that gives you info about the mountain and stuff like that. Everyone seems to find him annoying, but I don't. Obviously these people haven't played Burnout 3...Because that is the most annoying DJ ever. One thing I noticed was that the DJ from Burnout actually referenced the DJ from this game. I thought that was kind of cool.

Should you buy this game?
It has a lot of replay value because you have attributes and costumes to buy for every character. It's pretty fun and cheap now, so I say you should give this game a look.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/31/05