Shaun White Skateboarding

Shaun White Skateboarding takes a leaf out of Mirror’s Edge's book and sets itself in a dystopian near future that harks back to the Big Brother mentality of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in which conformity and the absence of the individual’s free will is placed first and foremost.

While that may make it sound like a work of great importance in the “Games As Art” debate rest assured that it serves merely as an excuse for you to rejuvenate and bring colour to the city by using your Flow. Flow is another way of saying that as you perform tricks you transform the environment and people around you from the drab and boring grey hued pedestrians and buildings that would make even an accountant look fun by comparison, into bright and colourful citizens with buildings daubed in outlandish colours and graffiti. Of course it’s not as simple as all that, with certain areas or people requiring you to get more Flow to level them up. All told you have three levels of Flow and will need to string together a series of tricks and grinds to be able to keep your Flow ticking over.

The unique aspect that Shaun White tries to bring to the genre is the ability to use certain objects to reach inaccessible areas by transforming and manipulating them. By this I mean that certain rails will extend automatically if you grind them and take you up to higher levels or that marked ramps can be moved up or down while riding them to reach other levels. It sounds interesting at first but unfortunately it’s merely an automatic action that is triggered once you interact with the object and doesn’t require anything from the player other than successfully hitting the correct spot or trick.

The online side of Shaun White brings the usual array of one-on-one trick modes and score attack modes, as well as some team based modes that put one group of skaters as ministry goons while the others play as the band of revolutionary skaters. It’s not particularly exciting in terms of options available to you and gives you four multiplayer maps to try out online with your friends.

The first real issue with Shaun White Skateboarding pops up when you start looking at the trick system. Unlike with Skate you aren’t restricted to the right stick to perform tricks by mimicking the movement using the tick, but instead you can use the face buttons to perform tricks in a simple manner. While that means that it's easier for casual gamers who might be intimidated by a complicated trick system to jump in, it also means that any challenge to performing a string of complicated tricks is removed. Rather than being a test of your skills it boils down to spamming button combinations until your flow level is large enough. What’s worse is that you aren’t really penalised for repeating tricks and can merrily spam away at one specific trick and build up your flow. To test it out I spent thirty minutes performing the exact same run in a skate park and happily got a high score while doing nothing more taxing than tapping my thumb on the same button several hundred times in a row.

The game’s ‘story’ is also a major hindrance to your enjoyment, with the character’s all appearing to have come from a copy of My Little Stereotypes handbook. The dialogue they spout is some of the worst written game dialogue I’ve ever had to listen to and resembles the insane mutterings of a crack addict at three in the morning. At one point in the game a character was making wisecracks and lewd remarks about women in general seemingly oblivious to the fact that my custom character was female herself. Luckily for him your custom character seems unable to speak and she merely nodded her head at him and took sexual equality all the way back to the dark ages. Sure, you might say that story and dialogue is of no consequence in a skating game and you’d be right up to a certain point, but when it is this bad it’s insulting to a person who has purchased the game with the intention of enjoying it and who is trying to have a fun time.

The final nail in the coffin is that the game looks like it could have been ported with no changes from a previous generation console. Textures are bland and dull and characters look lifeless and dead eyed at the best of times, and that’s after they’ve been supposedly transformed from their old grey selves. At least there is some slight respite in terms of the music on offer with a better than average selection of rock and punk tracks to listen to as you laboriously meander through the game from point A to B, but you’d be better off purchasing the actual albums rather than putting yourself through the agony of buying Shaun White.

The skateboarding genre has been a tough market to cater for of late, with the Tony Hawk franchise in its final death spasms as Tony Hawk Shred dies at retail and with Skate being the only viable game for skaters looking to trick it out online. That’s what makes games such as Shaun White Skateboarding all the harder to accept when it comes in with so few new ideas or compelling gameplay mechanics. We’ve seen and done it all before and most of the time it’s been done better by others out there. Ubisoft may have done some of the most innovative games of this generation but Shaun White Skateboarding is certainly not one of them.

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