Most people rank SSX3 as the best entry to the series, but in my opinion it lags behind tricky quite a bit.
I fail to see people bring up these shortcomings when it comes to SSX 3 and the overall enjoyment of the game. For the record, I never played blur or on tour and I'm sure I would have hated those more but that's a given considering most fans write those off and one was a wii title. So for reference, I really have only played tricky and the 2012 reboot.
Con list:
- Customization is HORRIBLE in this game.... I mean absolute trash. Most of the characters best clothing pieces are found in peak 1. Late game unlocks for getting gold/plat medals in peak 3 are downright terrible. Massive size accessories that don't make any of the characters look cool or stylish. Nothing like beating kick doubt and getting a lame gimmick accessory you will never use. Board graphic unlocks are also the worst out of any major snowboard game I have ever played including cool boarders... there is MAYBE like 4 or 5 boards in the entire game you can unlock that are somewhat cool.
- Cheat characters are not cool or fun to use. Voiceless skins you can't customize and some of them are downright terrible looking like bunny san and the other ones... were they meant to be joke characters? They put a stretch skin in the game...really???
- The fanfare and overall gushing by fans over the "immersive" 3 peak setup and how you can free ride down the mountain is laughable. As far as races go, there is only like 3 unique races you can do in the entire game. Gravitude is unique, metro city, and maybe snow jam. all the rest are ridiculously generic and boring including ALL the back country races and the peak 2 race courses. You cant even race more than 1 opponent in the back country. Now look at tricky... there was like 8 or 9 UNIQUE races including pipe dream and untracked (which was basically what fans were gushing about in this game acting like a backcountry course had never been done before) and they were all a blast to play in their own way. If your wanting to play outside of conquer the mountain mode good luck... have fun racing on snow jam and gratitude for the millionth time. For the record, what ssx 3 did with decent from peak 3 to 1 is exactly what tony hawks pro skater did in one of their games... cant remember which one but basically they put "indoor" areas between levels to make it seem like it wasn't loading but it was. In the case of ssx 3 fans seemed to ignore this fact and act like EA achieved the impossible by eliminating loading times riding down the mountain. Id rather enter a loading screen in this game then have to deal with randomly clipping a pipe or tree losing all my momentum for the thousandth time between courses while losing all my boost.
- The soundtrack is overrated. Yes it was cool hearing black eyed peas the first few times but after a while you start missing the smooth instrumentals SSX tricky had.
- The peak boss interactions were not compelling. No unique dialog between the characters. This was there way I guess of making up for the fact they essentially eliminated the rival system in tricky
- There is no replayability in the "trick" events. Big air and superpipe? Boring. Slopestyle? Also boring. No thanks on playing kick doubt for fun.
- Where is the content again? Generic courses galore! Guess ill be playing snow jam and metro city for the 1000000th time!
I get why fans like SSX 3 but to go from tricky to this product was undeniably a downgrade. Fans hated SSX 2012 deadly decent concept but it was done in ssx 3 with the LAUGHABLY bad peak 1 back country avalanche and deadly crevices up in peak 3. EA got away with it somehow here largely because they basically copied tricky's tight gameplay/controls. I actually think ssx 2012 was a better overall game than 3.
I would give tricky a 9/10 review score especially considering it was nearly a launch title for ps2/gamecube/xbox
SSX 3 gets a 5/10 for me. I get what EA big was going for here but the content and execution is SO lacking. I feel like another 8 or so unique race tracks and 5-6 more actual characters would have made this a bit better of a game but even then the game lacked a polish tricky had.
EddieWHOAchowski out