Warning: This review might have some small spoilers like mountains, unlockables and cutscenes so if you don't want anything to be revealed to you then YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
Introduction
Amped 3 is the latest in the series and ever since it changed hands to Indie Built, this series will never will be the same again with outrageous cutscenes, hilarious costumes, and brilliant new game modes.
You start off as a guy or girl in a bunny outfit with your crew planning to do something big. Then you have a nasty fall jumping off a huge ramp and bump into this weird girl called Dandelion, which takes you into a whole world of craziness.
Gameplay
There's a lot of challenges to choose from not all entirely to do with snowboarding like Sled Trauma where you must smash yourself the most, or going through checkpoints in a sled to the finish and all the challenges are easily found using the trail map.
One of the challenges is called Media Callouts where you have to perform a certain category of tricks to get the most points. These are quite boring and get in the way as they automatically activate when you go through them unless you turn them off at the options.
In the story there is quite a few varied challenges, which can be fun, but some of them are quite annoying for example when you have to rail on tree branches set up on a course high off the ground on the trees, you must not fall off having to go through up to 34 rings.
The cut scenes though are quite unique and really cool to unlock and watch as there's probably nearly an hour and a half of them. All, which have a link to each other, has a set style like Cassandra's scrapbook style and the frame-by-frame animation of Wiener Land.
When you have unlocked all the costumes it is very hard to make your mind up with an enormous selection of tops, shoes, boards, bindings which you could pretty much make any type of look you want which is awesome!
They also have a lot of pretty weird sleds to go down form rocking horses, duffle bags, toilets, bath tubs and a few others to sled down on a free run each with different speeds, weights and ease of balancing even though there's no description.
Graphics
The graphics are extremely smooth as you can see the mountain crystal clear for miles around. Everything no matter what the distance is already properly rendered unlike Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as it would look worse when you saw a part at a far distance.
The other riders look really good all simultaneously doing their own thing as you slide down the mountain as they're in just as much quality and detail as yourself.
There is a huge selection of costumes and all are very detailed and crafted. All the marks and words can usually be seen clearly even sometimes when you're going down a mountain and flipping off a ramp you can see the board details.
The menu's have this really weird cut and paste theme to it, but looks really nice and adds a unique feel I think no other game has attempted and executed so well for a long time.
Audio
You're spoilt for choice with over 300 indie tracks to choose from, all sounding great, most of them fitting quite well with the genre of sport game, but the Hip Hop genre I think really doesn't suit although there's the odd gem that does.
The sound effects are very accurate for example the carving on the snow; it adjusts really well when you're either doing a tight or long curve into the snow. All the other odd sound effects like the menu are just really weird, but do the job.
Ups: Really cool storyline, gameplay almost faultless, good selection of challenges and a lot of rider clothing customisation.
Downs: Some challenges will get on your nerves, sometimes whilst on rocks you'll be on air because of dodgy floor barriers (stops you from falling through the mountain) and Media Callouts are boring and there's a lot of them.
Overall
I've never liked snowboarding games until I met this one and still have never seen a game quite like it. Plus for the price any Xbox 360 owner should add it to their collection.
Written by Croc Stock |
Sorry it took me a long time!
Posted: Monday, July 31, 2006