GamesEyeView: SSX Review

GEV says: Have you ever picked up a game on a lark even though you weren’t sure it was for you? That’s what I did years a go with the original SSX. See, I don’t snowboard, so I wasn’t sure how much fun I’d have with it. But it had two things going for it: I can’t do a lot of sports but still play those games, and it looked more like an arcade title than a pure sim. Luckily for me, I got a fun, over the top game that I might not have otherwise picked up that turned me into a fan for the lifetime of the series.

But even as a fan, it’s hard not to acknowledge that the quality of the SSX games has been going down since SSX Tricky. In their attempts to “broaden the audience” by creating more realistic runs and gaming elements, somewhere along the way the SSX series has lost it’s soul. When the latest entry was unveiled, it was dubbed SSX: Deadly Descents, which quickly led series veterans to worry that the game was an even further departure from what originally made the series great. And while EA redubbed the game “SSX,” a rebranding can’t change the fact that the game is exactly that which we feared, with bits of what made the series great in the first place sprinkled in.