Finally Arrived Downhill – An SSX Review

After the flop of the last couple of SSX (Blur and World Tour), the series was thought dead, this new SSX seeks to redeem the series’ honor and does quite a good job at it. They went did a reboot like everything else has been doing recently but it’s just what it needed.

The story mode is a nice addition to SSX, it explains how the sport came to be and the reasoning behind those deadly drops and sick tricks, the definition of SSX coming from the 3 co-founders’ main sport, Surfing, Snowboarding and Motocross. It’s also introduces every new character in a mini-comic book style intro showing off what they did before joining the SSX team. All the new features from the game, the body armor, the wingsuit, the ice picks, the oxygen tank and the heat suit, are all well integrated all through the campaign. The difficulty is a slow ramp but even if you get overwhelmed, I’m not ashamed to admit there’s a couple of race I just couldn’t win 3rd or better (out of 4 racer), the game eventually gives you the option to automatically win the event and proceed to the next one.

Every mountain is a new area in the story mode and every mountain is a different deadly challenge. The course on each peak tend to be designed with that in mind, only one deadly hazard per area, but it also helps keep the design simple enough and closer to what it would be in reality. Keeping the original areas in mind, there was no way to could keep an area 100% exact and be able to make it for the game but the team behind designing these slopes did create a good rendition of every mountain available in the game in those tracks and tweaking them to give insane jumps and rails. If you have both a PS3 and a 360, I would suggest getting the PS3 version has it comes with the exclusive Mt. Fuji level, adding more descents for the same price.

Out of all the equipment, the wing suit has to be the best and most fun to use. There’s always those odd shortcuts or jumps you tend to miss because you just can’t jump far enough in previous SSX and this fixes that issue entirely. There’s also the opposite end of the spectrum which are the ice picks and the heat suit. When faced with levels requiring either of those equipment, I always cringed. The ice picks take a long time while turning before even taking effect and by the time they take effect, it’s usually too late. The heat suit itself is fine but the levels made for it means you can’t fall at all in the shade or you’re done, making it quite annoying if you’re like me and always hold tricks in too long…

The game gives you the option to use classic controller or the new scheme, which was well thought out. The classic scheme is exactly SSX Tricky’s scheme, the only downside to it is the lack of adaptation for the new features. The new scheme allows you to nose press, tail press and mix the tricks depending on which hand you want to use, the classic does not. The only beef I had with the new scheme is that like older SSX, being crouched gives you a speed increase and a chance to prepare for a jump but the crouch button is also mapped to tricks so every time you run into a small bump that lifts you off the ground, your character starts doing the trick instantly and more than not, makes you land while in a trick and tumble. If they had given a small delay for the jump button keyed trick to activate if held after a jump, the new scheme would be mostly flawless.

The online for the game is much less “online” and much more data share. Instead of favoring the head to head style most common in the older ones, they made an online ghosting called Rider Net, which shares your best times and trick attack to your people on your friend list to have them as ghost data while they go down the same event. For a system like that, I lack to see the need of an Online Pass but every EA title seems to go that way now and this one isn’t an exception.

For those of you expecting the good old Eddie “The Kid” Wachowski, if you didn’t pre-order the game, you’re out of luck as he came part of a bonus to some retailers. This can be seen as a disappointment for players that played Tricky extensively.

Even being an avid fanboy of SSX Tricky, I can only give this title a 7/10

The Pros –

The levels are well designed
The arcade feeling from Tricky was restored to the game
The online ghost data sharing

The Cons –

The classic control disadvantage
No Online Head to Head
Eddie being a Pre-order DLC only