IGN Review of Stoked

These days snowboarding titles are less about hitting outrageous tricks and more about capturing the culture of the extreme sport. Stoked follows this mold and is drenched with sponsors, pro riders, and song tracks that are designed to make you feel like you're right on the mountain. It even goes as far as to offer different helicopters and pilots depending on what region of the world you've decided to board. Yes, Stoked has the makings for a great snowboarding experience, but its general design flaws and lack of structure could drive those less than enthralled with the sport away.



Stoked is one of those rare experiences that starts off feeling shallow and boring and progresses nicely into a more free-flowing game. When you start you're an amateur boarder with no sponsor, no name and are essentially just boarding down mountains for the hell of it. Stoked presents you with a load of runs on each of the three introductory mountains (five authentic slopes are unlocked by the end), and each of these runs has a set of ten challenges. That amounts to a ton of stuff to do; the only problem is that it gets stale in a hurry.





Challenges are broken up into three basic types to start: those that require certain trick types, those that require specific tricks, and those that require you to beat a certain score. It's doing these challenges over and over again that will likely turn many off to Stoked. Sure, each mountain has a set of pro rider challenges that you'll need to complete to earn a chance at unlocking a pro-specific trick, but nothing feels all that different until you actually turn from amateur to pro.



It's at that time that sponsors start entering the picture and different challenge types open up. Keep in mind that I was playing the same challenges for around six hours until more were unlocked, but those that have the patience should be pleased with Stoked's depth. It took me about five hours to unlock the challenge types, but once I did Stoked instantly became more enjoyable.



It's too bad that riders are essentially directionless when the game starts. There's a brief tutorial and there are indicators in the customization menu (which is comparatively light when looking at other titles) that sponsorships are possible, but once you start boarding there's no kind of progress updates that pop up on-screen or indicators of how close you are to reaching the pro level. There's an "objectives" portion of the menu that disappears during the challenges, but I suppose something is better than nothing at all.





So how is the actual act of snowboarding? The short answer: it's a mixed bag. When you land an impressive trick solidly, on flat land, things are peachy. There's a good sense of reward and the tricks all look slid while you're in the air, but the problems start when you start tricking off of complex pieces of the environment.



As you make your way down the mountain you'll see everything from cottages, to broken tree trunks to large slabs of ice that you can trick off of. Sadly the physics in Stoked aren't quite where they need to be for these to be a viable tricking option. Getting stuck in creases in the environment and random bumps in logs and other objects will send you careening towards the ground for no apparent reason. During challenges that require specific tricks (like hitting boardslide and having the game read it as a noseslide because of a ridge on your grinding surface) this can be come exceedingly annoying.



There are also moments when you'll land a trick on what seems to be a perfect line, only to leave your boarder with a face full of powder. These instances are rarer than the inaccuracies with the physics, but they do still happen. Some can be attributed to Stoked's realistic slant on boarding, but others are just plain wrong.



One aspect of Stoked's design that I did enjoy was how the challenges are laid out on each mountain. Your copter drops you at one starting point, but it's then impossible to hit every challenge on one run down the slope. You'll need to get picked up again and chart a new path down the peak, just like you would on an actual mountain. The pickup and drop-off process is painless and quick without a loading screen in sight so the massive mountains are easily explored. It's just too bad that because of their size tricking areas can be few and far between during certain stretches.





Taking the game online opens each mountain up to seven other online players who can hop in and start up any of the six available multiplayer modes. It's nice that most of these are unique to Xbox Live, such as the 40 races and cool T.R.I.C.K. challenge. It's also cool that players can stop at any point on the mountain and create a challenge (the races are preset); just make sure that you're in a good area for tricking or it'll be over before you know it.



The multiplayer does a good job of separating itself from the rest of the game modes and feels as different as possible while still remaining Stoked. I noticed very subtle performance hiccups while on our test servers; here's hoping they're remedied by the time you get your hands on it.



Aesthetically speaking, the Stoked development team seems to have spent more time on finer details like snow sticking to your player model and weather effects than the core appearance. Normal stuff like details on your player and on the snow sitting five feet from you come up short thanks to aliasing and a general lack of polish. Other nuances like pulling the camera back to reveal the entire mountain (despite the pop-in problem with trees) and seeing day turn to night while a blizzard rolls in are pretty sweet.





Sound-wise, much like the rest of the package, Stoked is a mixed bag. Some tracks ring truer to the sport than others, but for the life of me I'll never know why they chose to play the same music clip whenever you successfully complete a challenge. It's the same damn five second burst of annoyance every time and it gets extraordinarily grating before you even hit the pro level. Effects are great when you're carving around the mountain with snow crunching under the weight of your board and powder spewing every which way. Once again, there's a downside, and in the sound department that turns out to be the lack of an adequate "thud" sound when you careen into the side of a cabin.



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