The past year has found gaming in the midst of a PlayStation 2 renaissance that, while a bit premature, has been embraced with open arms. With copious amounts of HD Collections, PSN remakes, and franchise reboots like Twisted Metal, gamers are able to re-experience all that the early aughts had to offer. EA has never been one to shy away from an industry trend, so it’s not surprising that we find ourselves with a new installment in the SSX series. The early PS2 entries in the franchise helped define the extreme sports genre with their blistering speed, environmental hazards, and otherworldly tricks. This new addition brings back all of these elements and more, but is it enough to reignite gamers’ love affair with the series?
SSX has you globetrotting on a mission to survive nine of the gnarliest mountain ranges the planet has to offer. There’s some semblance of a story regarding you trying to recruit new members to your team, but you’re better off not worrying about that. Instead, concentrate on the fact that you’ll eventually cut through powder on all seven continents. While EA has touted that each of the locations in the game were created using data gathered by NASA, the courses themselves play out more like a battle-zone of rubble with the sole purpose of destroying your rider. This minefield of destruction isn’t helped by the fact that the way your character reacts to an obstacle tends to differ from time to time — causing a distinct lack of confidence between the player and their avatar. Add to that unreliable physics that lead to far too many instances where your only option is to restart a challenge. In a game rife with as many environmental dangers as SSX, not knowing whether you’ll bounce off a tree unscathed or be thrown into the air in a mess of flailing limbs creates countless moments of frustration. While there is a rewind function that allows you to reverse time, you’re only given a limited number of uses on each run. In the early Tony Hawk titles, which arguably represent the pinnacle of the extreme sports genre, seasoned players were able to enter a sort of zen-like mode of play where they felt at one with their character as well as the environment. Sadly, this unity is never allowed to be fully realized throughout the course of SSX.
