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TAKE AN EXTREME SPORT, add in some obscenity, spice it up with some nudity and sell it with hype! That must be the reasoning that went into this one - imagine the scene, set in the board room of Acclaim's marketing department.
"We need to shift more units. We need an edge, something that hasn't been done before"
"Extreme sports!"
"er... it's been done"
"What if... we... we... er..."
"Breasts. That's what it needs. Extreme sports, and boobs. Big boobs. Make 'em bounce. It's hot. Make it happen"
So, here we are, the latest extreme sports title in our hands and we have to be eighteen to play it. Fortunately, we are all over 18, so it's not a showstopper. Thing is, do we actually want to play it? Let's check it out...
The concept, as already alluded to, is simple: in a Tony Hawk style game, you must choose your rider and then tackle a series of levels, each of which presents it's own chalenges. You have a BMX, some skill and an arsenal of tricks at your disposal. Can you beat the score? Can you complete the challenges? Each level has 30 challenges to complete, at varying degrees of difficulty - as per any other Tony Hawk style game. The difference here is that instead of rounding up missing tram tickets or chasing down pickpockets, you need to take hookers to their pimp or assist dogs in copulation - stuff like that. There are an awfully large number of missions involving some form of excrement or another... an interesting irony. More on that later.
As you ride around the level, there are a series of themed areas - a park, dead end street, a train stop - you get the idea. Each of these has it's own style and is complete with rails, stairs, ramps and so on. Pretty standard fair but nothing really wrong with it - the levels have a good flow and you can chain together tricks quite nicely, with each new trickable object well spaced out and placed with some thought. Obviously, a bit of testing went into this - the levels play well.
Where more testing could have been done however was in the chaining together of tricks. While the levels are setup nicely (you can immediately see where a nice grind / jump / grind / ramp chain will work), the ability to trick between grinds is severely broken. While you can simply bunny hop between grinds no problem, the real professional knows that the big scores come from cranking up the multiplier - if you want to break some records, you need to get as many tricks in as possible. This means trying a kick trick between grinds for example. That's almost impossible here. Time and time again, you'll pull out the trick after you bunny from the grind, only to glide over the next grind and terminate the trick. No obvious reason as to why, timing is all on the money - the trick just doesn't come out. Not only is this very bizarre (and odd to see in action), it painfully breaks your ability to pull of some nifty combos. Lame. |
