SSX: Out of Bounds

Snow. It’s cold, wet, causes traffic problems, stops the trains from running and means the post arrives late in the morning. But for all the hassle it causes, we love it here at PG towers. There’s no sight as exciting as opening the bedroom curtains one morning to find everything covered in white when, the night before, there wasn’t a flake to be seen. Even the dingiest housing estate looks pretty when given a sprinkling of snow. And then there’s the fun to be had playing in it.

It’s this double-sided coin that SSX: Out of Bounds captures so well: there’s plenty of fun to be had, but you need to be willing to put up with all of the problems that come with it.

First impressions of the game are good, very good. We're treated to the slick presentation that EA is renowned for and some top notch licensed music including the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Queens of the Stone Age (though you’ll need to use the stereo headphones to really enjoy it). The range of characters and the level of customisation available is similarly heartening. Any money your character earns on the slopes can be spent on new clothes and snowboards, letting you get really involved with your on-screen self.

The game doesn’t let itself down in the action stakes, either. When you take to the slope you’ve got a wide range of gravity-defying tricks and stunts to perform and, thoughtfully, the developers made pulling them off relatively easy. Whereas most snowboarding games will have you pressing various combinations of buttons all at once, each trick here is given a single number on the keypad. These basic tricks are enough to see you through most of the game and, if you’re feeling ambitious, you can build on them by holding down other keys while you perform them. The control of your ‘boarder on the slopes is very well taken care of, despite the lack of an analogue joystick for precision balance.

Where it all falls over in a flurry of snow, arms and legs is the on-slope visuals. From the screenshots here, it looks great. But that’s because they’re still. It’s when you’re hurtling down the side of a mountain SSX comes a cropper. The game is just too ambitious in it’s appearance and the N-Gage hardware simply can’t keep up. This means that the upcoming scenery doesn’t appear on the screen until you’re almost upon it, at times giving you the impression of snow blindness. There’s also very little actual detail to your snowboarder, so that while you can buy and equip him or her in some fancy kit, you won’t actually be able to see much of a difference in the game. Most troubling of all though is the almost complete lack of any sense of speed. A little speedo in the corner of the screen says you’re doing 58mph but it rarely feels more than 15.

The action can quickly become repetitive too. The main game mode, Conquer the Mountain, sets you the challenge of entering a competition to win events on a variety of themed routes set on one of three mountain peaks. With each peak providing a half-dozen or so routes, there should be plenty of variation on offer. The powers that be, however, clearly think you need to work harder for your fun, as you have to race each route three times through a qualifying race, semi-final and then the grand final itself, before you can progress to the next one.

A Bluetooth multiplayer mode and the ever-present challenge of racking up extra points performing 'radical' combos of tricks keeps things a little livelier than they would be otherwise, but you’re going to need to be a snowboarding fan with plenty of patience to see SSX through to the bitter end. For the more casual player however the short term enthusiasm will cool pretty quickly leaving the feeling that you'd have been better off staying in doors.