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SSX

Karooo

By Karooo,
in Games

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  • 3 weeks later...
HundredProofSam Community Regular

HundredProofSam

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At the E3 demonstration, there's no suggestion that the game itself, in development for a couple of years already at EA Canada and due in January 2012, has undergone a major change in direction. It's still based on real-world locations and still features the formerly titular deadly descents as dramatic, high-action "boss" levels.

 

Nor is there any suggestion, even from this pre-alpha code, that it's anything less than a fantastic addition to a much-loved series. SSX looks great and plays as smooth as virgin snow.

 

It's not long before we're pelting down a twisting tunnel of ice that is supposedly in the heart of Kilimanjaro's frozen volcano (but looks more like something from Mario Kart crossed with WipEout) while our demonstrator tells us the team's aim is to deliver "Burnout on snow".

 

We start with the race inside Kilimanjaro, beginning in the Kibo crater and plunging into its fancifully imagined intestines. In many races, riders start from different points on the mountain before converging on the track; here, Mac, Elise and others start scattered around the crater rim before meeting at the tunnel mouth.

 

You can use either an old-school button configuration or the more modern twin-stick approach; I use the latter when I get to try the mode out and it is very fluid, responsive and slick.

 

There's a great sense of freedom to the environments too, with no artificial restrictions to your movement and a physics system, rather than design scripting, dictating which edges you can grind.

 

We're at the highest peak in North America, Denali (otherwise known as Mount McKinley) in Alaska, and our enemy is snow. What that means in practice is procedurally generated avalanches created by your own snowboard: everywhere in the game, the terrain is subject to a stability analysis, and the forces you exert on the snow while riding - a heavy landing, a hard carve at high speed - have the potential to loosen snow, creating spray, slough, slides and even different categories of avalanche.

 

The deadly descent sees us plummeting 1500 metres down the south face of Denali in a dim twilight, the boarder's head lamp flickering across the snowscape and a frightening apron of tumbling snow chasing him down the sheer face of the mountain.

 

SSX generally isn't afraid to pull the camera far back from the boarder and simply fill the screen with white mountainside, to great effect. This deadly descent unusually reverses the camera angle, looking back towards the mountain and the boarder tumbling down it in a distant, almost 2D presentation that looks like filmed helicopter coverage. It's really effective, although hard to imagine how it maps to the controls. The demonstrator only makes it halfway down before being engulfed in his own wake of snow.

 

SSX isn't really what was suggested by either its first appearance as Deadly Descents, or its subsequent, minimal rebranding. It looks, very unusually for an extreme sports sequel, like a game made to high standards, with considerable creative and technical ambition, but also sensitivity to its arcade roots. It might not be the game SSX fans imagined - but it probably is the game they've been waiting for.

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