Shaun White Snowboarding
If you’re looking for a super-realistic snowboarding title, crammed to the brim with challenges, you may want to continue searching. 
Shaun White Snowboarding is the champion of Xbox 360-based games of this genre, but only because it is the only title in the genre represented on the platform. It is a ‘pretender’ to titles such as Amped 2 and 1080, but it doesn’t quite get close to the experience that those games offer. Still, it’s a fun, socially orientated action sports game that can provide players with many hours of fun.
Initially, this title is all about realism, which is great and something that many people demand from this kind of game. While the SSX series may have been fun, they are to snowboarding what Wipeout is to motor sports, and fans of the activity want something that’s a little truer to reality. Shaun White Snowboarding presents that player with four mountains around the world, and the ability to experience them freely. The player can spend many hours exploring the slopes.
The first issue that crops up is that the controls are very simple. It’s easy to look good in this game, and landing a very dodgy trick is more often than not successful. Sure, looking good is fun, but the challenge of the title is slightly removed when it is fairly easy to complete a trick that should take hours (at the very least) to master. This makes running the slopes a little boring after a while, and will invariably lead the player to take part in the numerous challenges that dot the mountains. These vary widely in theme and difficulty, and add a lot of value to the experience.
The scoring system used by the challenges is quite strange and more than a little confusing, but that doesn’t matter too much. As a reward for completing challenges, the player can ‘work’ to acquire specialised moves, such as super speed or impossible jumps. That’s where Shaun White Snowboarding loses the plot, and realism flies out of the window. It lends the title a confused feel, as though the game is scrabbling for an identity without success.
The story is driven by the collection of coins on the four mountains, a task that varies from really easy right through to excruciatingly difficult. Collect all the coins and you get to compete against Shaun himself, and that, dear reader, is as deep as the story gets.
Still, while it may seem all doom and gloom, Shaun White Snowboarding is a great way to spend a few hours, particularly in online play. In fact, the game almost demands it. It can be played as a multiplayer experience – even the challenges – and the title lends itself to a more social experience than a single-player challenge.
If you’re looking for a super-realistic snowboarding title, crammed to the brim with challenges, you may want to continue searching. If you’re looking for a game that will allow you to relax and spend some ‘quality’ time with online friends, it’s perfect.