It's never a good feeling to turn on a new game only to be disappointed within the first few seconds. The intro -- made up from recordings of real-time play -- looks shoddy to begin with. It looks like they got a very bad encoder and recorded someone playing the PS2 version. In between certain gaps in the intro music and certain stunts you individually meet the characters of the game which might just entice you to watch the whole thing. The only bonus is that you hear one of the catch phrases that will stick in your head -- and crack you up each and every time.

The aim of the game is simply to unlock everything. New riders, new bikes, new tracks, new stunt levels and new outfits await you -- mostly all to be unlocked in the Circuit Mode. The only things you can unlock in other modes are the new outfits which are done by completing every trick and/or combo moves for each character. Speaking of characters, it seems that when it comes to any game that involves a sport with extremely unbelievable tracks and tricks certain personalities just won't allow their likeness to be portayed. This, or the publisher won't even bother trying to sign a well known sportsman simply because of having to pay them -- and with EA BIG creating the SSX Tricky series many thought the same was going to happen here.

On playing the game you will be forgiven for thinking these characters were nothing more than a figment of EA BIG's giant creative head, but just to set the record straight, these highly animated -- and tattooed -- characters are all some of the biggest Freestyle Riders on this planet. Each of them have in turn created some of their own tricks which are included in this game.

So every racing/stunt game has it's Championship mode. The typical first place opens another track and maybe another hour of game time, but in Freekstyle it just isn't that simple. In Freekstyle it's called Circuit mode, and before you think that first place you just earned got you anywhere, it didn't. Well, it got you closer to earning the next track but you still have to beat this track two more times. The first two attempts are basically your qualifying attempts, so come 3rd or higher and you're onto the next attempt. It's once you're finished with these qualifiers that the truly experienced rider has learned the ins and outs of the track, learned when to pull up on a jump, when to turn right instead of straight through and, most importantly, how to come first.

The jump in AI is sometimes very annoying, and on some courses it is just plain nasty. Some stages, on first attempt, could easily take a gamer 11 minutes or maybe longer just to complete one qualifying round -- only to fail and have to try again. Let's say you fail your first attempt at each qualifier and the main event but get successfully placed in your second attempt. It is likely you have just spent an hour on the one track, but to be honest that is being generous. The main gripe here is not so much that some levels are hard but that some seem misplaced in the track listing. Any racer who completes a hard track will find themselves completing the next track after one attempt without even breaking a sweat. The nice thing about the Circuit mode is that if you don't complete the main even the first time you don't have to re-qualify, you just have to try the main event again.

There are three different game modes inside the Circuit challenge though, so don't think unlocking all these tracks are getting you nowhere. After finally beating all 6 tracks you unlock the Freestyle competitions one by one. Basically you get 3 minutes to get a trick score that is preset. Fail and try again, succeed and unlock another competition. And lastly -- once you have completed all the competitions -- you unlock Freekstyle mode. In this mode you are chucked back onto the race tracks but this time you only have one attempt to not only come first but also get the score that has been allocated to each level. Get prepared to get frustrated.