Shaun White Snowboarding – Road Trip Review – Great Balance Board Controls, Very Few Courses

Shaun White Snowboarding – Road Trip

Score: 6.8 (with balance board)

Systems: Wii

Genre: Stunt based racing
Duration: 6 hours
difficulty: 5
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher: Ubisoft
Release Date: 11/16/08

advantage
– Snowboarding with the balance board is a lot of fun.
– Strategy of different combinations of characters.

cons
– Little variety of tracks
– Not enough different tasks

When the balance board was released, it was hard to discern its value because Wii Fit wasn’t really a game. Maneuvering through tracks while completing tricks is more challenging and fun if you use the balance board, which helps validate the potential of the technology. Unfortunately, the game’s lack of track variety and tasks slows down the overall experience.

There are countless extreme sports games out there, but none appeal to you quite as much when combined with the Wii Balance Board. To control your character, simply shift your weight towards the screen to crouch and increase speed. Your character reacts realistically and turns left and right when you move your weight back and forth (the board is facing sideways). By picking up and slamming your heels against the board, you can get some air at the bottom of ramps or grind down planks. When grinding on rails, you will need to keep your balance to complete the trick.

The controls work very well to make you feel like you are controlling your character as he glides down the mountain slopes. In fact, it helps prove that I should probably never snowboard because of my poor sense of balance. If you don’t use the balance board, the game isn’t as much fun with the Wiimote and nunchuk controllers. Simply guide your character with the joystick and perform tricks by moving the Wiimote left or right to simulate your weight shift. Needless to say, it’s not as immersive as balancing and shifting your weight.

This is an extreme sports game so tricks are the name of the game. As you slide down the slopes, you can jump off the ramps or slide down the rails to rack up trick points. You can perform various types of tricks by shifting your weight between the various combinations of the front and back of your feet, such as distributing your weight fully on the front of your feet, on the back of your feet, or splitting your weight between the front and back of your feet. back of his feet. rear feet More advanced tricks that require more time to achieve are available by also pressing the A, B or both buttons simultaneously. You’ll earn points for any trick you can pull off, but if you land cleanly, you’ll earn a multiplier that increases all subsequent trick points. By chaining together multiple clean tricks, the multiplier increases to help send your scores into the stratosphere.

Each character in the game has primary and secondary abilities to add a bit of strategy to the game. Your main character’s landing, speed, tricks, and grappling skills largely determine how you’ll fare in any given run. You’ll want to switch between faster characters for the fastest run times and characters with better landing or trick skills for trick-focused runs. Supporting characters give you skill upgrades if you earn their respect by doing some crazy tricks or collecting crowns scattered throughout the races.

One of the key limiting factors in the game is that there is a very limited pool of objectives. Some races simply require you to reach the bottom of a slope within a certain time frame or to place first among some competitors. Most races involve earning a set number of trick points as you progress through the race. Some races have a set number of items to collect before reaching the end of some races.

The variety of tracks is also very limited. While most of the races are expected to involve sliding down the sides of mountains, there should still be more obstacles and a variety of terrain. There are a couple of careers that have forked paths, but these opportunities are nothing more than an extra leap to exploit. Some half-pipe tracks break up the pace of the game, but they’re just simple tracks that let you pull off a long series of awesome tricks. Road Trip should have been inspired by the over-the-top styling of the SSX series, which is well known for its incredible grinding rails, elaborate loops, and multiple branching paths within each race.

Multiplayer games involve very generic modes found in many other racing games. Cooperative mode allows up to 4 people to work together for the fastest times or the highest cumulative trick scores. The Hot Seat game allows you to rotate between players and compete for the best time or the best score. You can also compete in individual events or in cup competitions to determine the best racer for your chosen events. None of these modes are online.

Road Trip’s cartoon-style graphics are sub-par even by Wii standards. Frame rate is solid, but there’s very little texture variety to keep things interesting. The sound effects are also quite bland and limited, notably repeating throughout the game’s runs. The music tracks include quite a bit of variety from the alternative, modern, and classic rock genres, but they certainly don’t blast through the speakers to put you in the mood to set any trick point records.

If it weren’t for the game’s heavy use of the balance board, Road Trip would be a very mediocre game. The limited variety of hints and tricks prevents the game from creating much replay value or challenging gameplay. Hopefully more games will take advantage of the balance board to make the games more interesting, but not let the implementation of the controls stop the rest of the game from being fun.

Be sure to visit our site to also check out the game video review, gameplay videos and images.