Riggers are the MacGuyver skaters - they see potential gaps and lines where others don’t even bother to look, and can build crazy things to skate with whatever happens to be lying around. In game, this means you can build kickers, quarter-pipes, grind rails and all kinds of stuff to skate on wherever you want, and eventually get the ability to climb and break into buildings to find the most insane places to skate.

Hardcore skaters are the ones doing it for the sport, and apparently, pushing people over while they’re at it. This gives us:

The Aggro Kick - kick extra hard using the RB button, allowing you to get up to speed and nail those huge gaps - although you’ll need a sense of timing to keep the speed up.
The Aggro Push - use the scenery to push yourself along and gain speed while in a manual.
Skate Checking - knock over a pedestrian or another skater who’s in your way.
Bowl Riding - carve and slash grind in bowls.

…and yes, it can all be used in a combo.

You’ll need to complete Career, Rigger and Hardcore goals to progress in the game and learn the new abilities - taught to you by pro skaters like Bob Burnquist, Dustin Dollin, Arto Sari and Mike Vallely - each accompanied by some real video footage of them skating, which is a nice touch. Mastering all of the new abilities will allow you to create fantastically long, intricate and unique combos and of course, score those big points.

Another new feature is the video editor. It’s a fairly impressive little tool - and surprisingly usable considering how unsuited a game controller is for timeline-based video editing. You can animate the camera position, add video effects like the ubiquitous fish-eye, and cut your own soundtrack using the 60 tracks in the game - including Jurassic 5, Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins. What would’ve made this perfect is if the camera was always rolling, allowing you to take the last 30 seconds of gameplay into the editor at any time - instead you need to pull up a menu and manually trigger the recording in advance.

The game carries on with the sandbox style that was introduced in American Wasteland. It’s a truly massive environment, and you’ll have to complete tasks to unlock it all, but you can skate around the entire unlocked area without a single loading screen. This is obviously conducive to exploration and just mucking around - exactly what made recent Grand Theft Auto games so popular.

The unfortunate downside is the fact you need to skate to different areas on the map to start each goal - you can’t just pick from a menu and get cracking. Once a couple of areas have been unlocked it can take a considerable amount of time to move from one end of the map to the other, and game gives you little help getting there - it’s not smart enough to give you accurate directions - merely pointing to the task “as the crow flies” which often leads you to a dead end.

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This entry was posted by Tim Hanlon on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 7:17 am and is filed under Reviews, Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.