As far as the snowboarding genre has gone this generation we’ve only really had Amped 3 and SSX Blur for the Wii. Both were fairly competent but didn’t really deliver on the full rush that snowboarding provides. It might have been down to them being fairly early in the development cycle but since those I really can’t recall any snowboarding games that have stood out. Shaun White Snowboarding looks interesting enough to come in and take away any kind of buzz from an SSX or an Amped and automatically become top dog. Unfortunately there are way too many things wrong with the game.

Now it’s understandable that there are some problems with the first game in a series. A similar game, Skate had teething problems and looks like it will be ready to go a second time around better off for it. Shaun White Snowboarding actually borrows a few elements from Skate by giving you every trick in the game at the beginning. It also uses a similar unorthodox control scheme that was seen in Skate with the analog controls that take use of simple mechanics that plays into what should work incredibly well. That’s why it’s puzzling that the game plays horribly primarily due to the controls.

The animation is so twitchy and un-fluid that you don’t even think your in control of the character most of the time. When you do finally hit tricks it feels great but it’s just the directional work that is where the game stumbles into an avalanche. You don’t feel like your in control but you do feel like your tricking the game into doing what you want to do. Surprisingly this isn’t the only major control flaw the game has because holding forward is the only way to get any real speed but it’s also how you do front flips meaning that you’ll inadvertently fall flat on your face all to often.

The core of the game is made up of various scored, timed and event based challenges which all work very well. When your in a challenge you normally know what your doing and how to do it, it makes perfect sense. It’s the mindless segments in between when you are free-boarding around the mountains trying to find the challenges. It’s not the fact that they are open areas because you can actually have quite a lot of fun just bombing down hills and hitting crazy tricks, it’s the fact that you can’t jump to a challenge. Combine that with the aforementioned horrible controls and you’ve got a brutal combination that takes the fun out of any game.

It’s a shame because if you watched a video of Shaun White Snowboarding you would see what is a perfectly good game. Great graphics combined with a stellar soundtrack look like a great experience. As we all know looks aren’t everything and although it looks promising you really won’t find much to enjoy here. Sure it’s the only snowboarding game we’ve seen for years but with the large number of titles out this year this is one that you should pass on.

Despite saying this, since the team that made Amped went under and the fact that SSX hasn’t seen a core game for years shows that there is a place for snowboarding within games. If you make the challenges more physically accessible, revamp the controls and generally make the game more intriguing during the first few hours then you would have a decent game. Instead Shaun White unfortunately feels unfinished in a major way.