SSX 3 (PS2)

You reflect on your run...the avalanches, falling trees, a plane crash, sunlight, darkness, caves, city, shotcuts, wrong turns....

Then you realise...That was the best 30 quid you've ever spent.

Treat yourself.

SSX's latest re-incarnation - SSX 3 - takes everything that was truly wonderful about it's predecessor and improves it. Massively.

3 is much more free-roaming than Tricky and, in my opinion, better for it. You start on Peak 1 (of 3) and gain access to more slopes and events as you progress through the game. Many of the characters from Tricky make a welcome appearance in 3 but there are some new characters too. Characters are, again, customisable in terms of ability and appearance.

Graphically, I've seen NOTHING else on PS2 that even comes close. This game is simply beautiful and blows you away at times with the depth of scenery that you can see - the view from the top slopes is amazing.
The soundtrack, in common with Tricky, is equally excellent - full of top tunes and totally customisable.

I love it. I loved Tricky and I'm sold on the evolutionary concept of 3 - it's a natural progression and it makes the game a different type of challenge to Tricky. I'd heartily recommend it to any Tricky veterans and SSX newbies alike. Plug it in, crank it up, suspend your sense of belief and enjoy this for what it is - pure, massive, unadulterated FUN!

In SSX3 you can now buy clothes for your character and put them on seperatley, so instead of just choosing costumes like in the previous SSX games you can now have any combination of items you want, and there are lots of different items of clothing available to buy and win. This allows you to make the ultimate customized characters dressed to match your taste, very fun. You can now equip ANY board you want because the boards don't effect your stats in this game so you can go for the best looking boards instead of the ones with the highest stats.

The Uber Trick system as also been upgraded. Every character starts with 6 uber tricks that they can perform but once you start earning some money from winning events you can buy new ubertricks and equip them and set up your character just how you like them with all of your favourite uber tricks. All of the characters can buy and perform all of the ubertricks so you won't have a problem with not being able to use the ones you like best.

The new soundtrack greatly improves gameplay with customized play lists. This game has something like 35 tracks from real artists which you can listen too in 2 different ways. You can either tune in to Radio BIG with DJ Atomika which plays all 35 tracks in random order with the DJ giving you mountain updates or you can buy your own songs in the shop and make up your own playlist so you never have to listen to any of the tracks you don't like. You can also listen to your playlist with the DJ which basically turns it into Radio BIG but without the tracks you don't like.

A device called the M-comm which all of the boarders have now allows you to recieve text messages from other riders which inform you of when the computer has broken your records on certain tracks or you can recieve hatemail from riders if you start knocking them over during events. Quite a handy tool.

I am also very impressed with the improved AI of the computer controlled characters. If you start knocking them over they will start fighting back very well, or even ganging up on you if you make too many enemies. If you make them too mad they'll go out of their way to make sure you get knocked down. The computer now actually takes shortcuts so winning a race is now much harder than simply smashing through a sign or two and ending up a minute ahead of the computer, this makes for very challenging and fun gameplay.

Finally, one of the best features of all in my opinion, the online play. I absolutely LOVE playing SSX3 online with people from all over the world. You connect the the EA servers and join chatrooms with other players where you can all talk and challenge eachother to play games. The games you play will go down on your ranking and you can see how many games other people have played, how many they have won and how many they have lost. If you perform particularly well in an event online you can also get online records where you will go into the list of the top 100 on each track for time or poitns.

If you're thinking what i used to think, that this game wouldn't be very different from tricky and you won't get much gameplay out of it, don't. SSX3 almost seems like an entirely different game with every aspect improved. It is also far more challenging than the previous so you now actually need to evlove strategies for each track if you are going to get the gold on each.

I would recommend this game to anyone who played one of the previous 2 SSX games and liked them.