Shaun White Snowboarding Wii Review

From one of the most hottest snowboarders today comes a game that I'm sure everyone has heard about. Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip (SWS). Shaun White was supposed to do for snowboarding games what Tony Hawk did for skateboarding games, but it fell short. This following review is for the Wii version of the game. Sadly I can't get my hands on a wii balance board, which might have knocked up the score of this game for my review for some originality and perhaps fun.

You start off with two characters: one with better jumping abilities and one who can ride faster then the rest. As you continue new riders tag along for the journey, all with their own specialty. During any event you can choose who you want to be your rider and another to be the cameraman. When you fill up the bar on the bottom right of your screen by doing tricks or collecting crowns you can use the camerman's special ability until the bar runs out. The mixing and matching of the characters adds a little interest in the way you play, however I was disappointed with the characters from the beginning. There is no customization at all. You can't change their clothes, build up their abilities, or even choose from regular or goofy style riding. The characters are what they are.

There aren't many tracks either. You get four per mountain with 5 mountains unless you got the target special edition. The tracks aren't very long either. With each track they give you challenges, up to four. You must complete the challenges to unlock more tracks on the mountain. When you first get to a mountain you have no choice what track or challenge you want to do, but the more you unlock the more choice you have. The challenges are what you would expect from a snowboarding game: racing, tricks and collecting trinkets, which happens to be trash. The races are too short. You also only race up to 2 other people or against the clock. All races are about 3 minutes or under. That just goes to show you how short the tracks are. For tricks there isn't much variety. You use just the wiimote to do the tricks. Just by tilting the wiimote you decide which way to turn or twist. The A and B buttons control the grabs. And that's pretty much it. When you do a course that requires tricks you either have to get a certain amount until you reach the end or in a certain time limit. For the trinket challanges you have to collect a certain number of soda cans that can be found on rails or at the top of jumps. Each track will have up to two challenges with two objectives in each challenge. With each mountain you travel too the amount you need to reach gets higher for both trick score and trinkets, and the races get a bit harder. But it's pretty much the same task over and over.

Another disappointing feature is the music. With these types of games music is a huge deal seeing how it not only ties into the game but the culture of these sports. The music does have a bit of variety ranging from Jefferson Airplane to Three Days Grace to Metro Station. You can shuffle through the songs by pressing the 1 button anywhere during the run just like you would use an iPod shuffle. Which if you haven't used a shuffle before I suggest not wasting your money on them. But only certain songs are played on certain tracks in this game. So even if you do find a few songs you like they aren't avaliable to listen to everywhere.

This game can also be played as a multi player, where you take the tracks in the single player game and compete either turn based or side by side in different challenges: racing and tricks. This adds to the game where you can push yourself against friends to add more to the competition mentality of the game.

The last thing i would like to mention about the game is that as you move on in the game completing challenges you get emails from characters, which is nothing special and I stopped reading them after the first couple. Also under the computer icon, where you find the emails, you can earn momentos, which are pictures of the game or drawings. You have to complete the extra challenge on each track, remember how I said there was too, to unlock these. They don't really add much to the game either.

Maybe I'm a bit cynical after playing SSX3, which is my favorite snowboarding game of all time. They set the bar high, which SWS couldn't even dream of reaching. They let you explore the mountain, had more tracks and they were a lot more interesting as well, the music list was huge and you could make your own playlist, plus they had character customizations. If I didn't have all that to compare SWS to I would still feel like this game was lacking. It's not one of the best games of all time. It was fun to play but there wasn't a lot of game time either. It's a good game to play on a weekend by yourself or with friends for a rental price, but it's not worth the $50 price tag.

All in all I give it 2 out of 5 Stars.

I struggled with whether to give it a 2 or 3. It does have some good playing time, but with all of what it's lacking and the price for what the game is i had to go with a 2. Now if you have the wii balance board maybe you could knock it up to a 3.