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Shaun White Skateboarding

Shaun White Skateboarding

Ubisoft take up the fight against EA's Skate with this rather stoned look at the skateboarding genre. Rasmus has been fighting for our skate-souls in Shaun White Skateboarding...

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When you aim to topple to current king of a genre, you're forced to bring something fresh, almost revolutionary, to the table. For many years Tony Hawk was the unchallenged king of the hill, until Skate kicked him down a notch with more realism and innovative controls. Now Skate is the new leader of the pack, and Shaun White Skateboarding the challenger. And what does the Olympic gold medalist bring to the skate-genre? A whole lot of LSD, it seems like.

Because there is a lot of hippie-skating in Shaun White Skateboarding. The game takes place in New Harmony, a city where all creative and free thoughts have been banned, everything is gray and boring and everyone is forced to conform and become part of the masses. This dystopia is led by an organization called The Ministry, that keeps the populace brainwashed. And skateboards are of course forbidden.

But the revolutionary group The Rising fights for more colors and variation, led by no one less than Shaun White himself. The Ministry has managed to capture Shaun and is keeping him prisoner deep inside their headquarters, and as a newly recruited and liberated member of The Rising you have to fight to save Shaun and re-color the world by - literally - doing tricks with your skateboard.

Shaun White Skateboarding
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Most of the environments in the game starts out grey, and by doing tricks they are filled with colors and are painted with graffiti. The boring people that are all wearing the same clothes all of the sudden become more colorful and relaxed in the way they dress when you do tricks near them.

It's a rather stoned idea for a game, but there's nothing wrong with that. Even though the concept sounds like something thought up during a binge during the last night at the Roskilde Festival, it's not actually a bad idea. It's the actual execution that finds the game lacking.

The biggest problem is the controls. Just like in Sate, most tricks are done with right analogue stick, but the system is far from as refined and precise as in that game. While small variations in how you move the stick play a big role in Skate, the tricks in Shaun White Snowboarding never come more advanced than pushing up-down or left-right (or the other way around). The so-called "advanced tricks" are done by keeping the right trigger pressed by doing the same motions. Grinds are done by more or less hitting the rail, the angle doesn't matter and you have to mess up royally in order to bail when you do your verts.

It means that there is more or less no challenge when it comes to doing tricks, and because of this Shaun White doesn't feel like a game about skateboarding. At the same time it's pretty clumsy. While in a vert you do transfers or front flips in the same way, the only thing that is different is timing. Ollies can be made by pressing X or using the right stick. It feels a bit odd that the same trick can be done in two different ways, especially since X is also used to talk to people. Many times I do an ollie instead of starting a new mission, which gets annoying really fast.

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Shaun White Skateboarding

Instead Shaun White is more about exploring and navigating through the terrain to get to the place you need to be to finish your current mission. It gets really psychedelic when you need to use the green, arrow-shaped rails that grows when you use them. At first they follow a certain route, but later in the game you get to control which way they go yourself, and that way you can reach places that previously were out of reach or just put together really, really long grinds. It's also a bit trippy, but it's a unique and fun feature and one of the game's most interesting elements.

There are other things you can do to shape the environments. Scattered across the world are markings with one of three colors - yellow, blue or purple. The color represent the level of "flow" you need to activate them. Flow is built up by doing tricks, and is split into three corresponding colors. If you have enough of it you can change the terrain and ramps, rails and similar start to grow out of the ground.

The Flow-mechanic might be interesting, but it's mostly lost potential. To get flow you just have to do tricks - you don't need to chain them together or anything like that. Your flow does keep ticking down, so you need to keep doing tricks pretty much constantly to keep it up, but while it might take time to reach the highest levels, there's no actual challenge to it. In the end it feels more like a chore, especially since the game resets the counter when you start a new mission.

Shaun White Skateboarding

The game has a rather linear campaign, where you get missions from different characters. There's only one available at a time, which makes it feel even more linear. It lacks the same nice option to just cruise around and see what you can find, like in for example Skate 3. There are hidden challenges you can find and do in whatever order you want, but the built-in map doesn't do much to help you find them since you can set up waypoints or teleport around. The voice acting is surprisingly good though, and the propaganda poster loading screens are pretty entertaining.

But like the other highlights of the game, they are not enough to hide the fact that the basic mechanics of the game aren't very exciting. Since there's no challenge when it comes to doing tricks, it never feels like you get better or train for something. What you do on your board should be the most important thing in a skating-game, and Shaun White got nothing on Skate in this department. I am not even sure that it's an upgrade from the old Tony Hawk-games. For now you'll probably have more fun digging up Skate 3 again.

05 Gamereactor UK
5 / 10
+
Some good ideas, fun dystopic propaganda, good voice acting
-
Boring gameplay, repetitive mechanics
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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