The gameplay in Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding can easily deter even the most die-hard snowboarding fans.
User Rating: 6.4 | Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding XBOX
Microsoft’s Xbox is revolutionary in many ways: it’s power, online support, and yes, its size. The launch of Xbox also started off with some interesting and unusual titles. Something quite notable would be that 3 snowboarding games were all launched within about one month of each other. Snowboarding games, however, have typically remained a rather unpopular genre. There were a few notable snowboarding games during the last generation of consoles, but nothing compared to the amount of already released, or future snowboarding games planned for Xbox. One of these 3 is Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding. After playing through this and the other released snowboarding games on Xbox, one statement really stands out: Quantity does not mean quality. Amped is a game that feels very used. This is probably because it becomes apparent that many of the techniques and gameplay elements were borrowed over from 1080 Snowboarding for N64, and slightly tweaked to be more original. However, Amped deserves credit where credit is due. It contains some interesting, and original gameplay elements not to be found in other snowboarding games, or at least not too specifically. In Amped, not only can you race down the track trying to get points, but you can face up against pros, or get sponsored by snowboarding companies if you perform well for them. The better you do in said challenges, your worldwide rank increases. If you get sponsored, you can get a whole list of interesting clothes and gear that you can customize your character with. This is the best part, but most of said challenges can be beaten within a few days, and provide some iffy replay value. Despite some of these interesting elements, the gameplay itself feels very broken. Often times you’ll be riding down a hill, and you’ll be going strangely fast, or abnormally slow. This deteriorates from the game, as it feels chunky and artificial. Generally, though, the speed is fairly consistent, or at least consistent enough that it won’t cause any real problems. However, the main problem in the game is where you’d expect the game to shine: the tricks, jumps, rails, and the like. The tricks are very annoying to complete, and often you have to be perfectly straight to land properly. The rails, also, are very poorly executed. The tricks you perform while grinding are not only repetitive, but just way too easy to perform. This makes Amped a very frustrating game, on many levels, but just plain easy on others. When a console debuts, graphics are rarely pushed to their limits. While Amped is not pushing the Xbox’s power by any means, the game still looks pretty polished on the whole. There are some nice snow effects, and the character models don’t look all the bad either. In fact, there are some very nice textures throughout the game, and a lot of little things are well executed and very well animated. The trees look stellar, and the distant backgrounds are well designed. However, sometimes a sloppy frame rate is noticeable, and you can find yourself confused as to where you’re headed next due to some occasionally bland level design. Few would consider Amped to be a love/hate game, but it has a love/hate soundtrack, that’s for sure. It is made up entirely of licensed music: generally punk, or alternative genres. For the genres they are, the music is fairly decent, but even the most avid punk fans won’t find anything too special here. The selection of music will cater to few people’s tastes, and if you like rock, instrumental or classical, it will definitely get on your nerves. You can download music from Xbox’s hard drive, but the music that’s given is, quite simply, very disappointing. The sound in Amped is nothing too notable. There are some bystanders who will make a few comments, or you can here yourself crashing into a tree, or grinding on a rail, but it’s nothing above or beyond. It depends on what you consider to be annoying, but many of the bystanders’ comments can really start to eat at you, especially since they’re largely composed of various insults. If you fail a trick they’ll pull a rude comment or two, but if you do well they’ll shout, “Sick!” or something to that effect. Really, it seems like these are your average sound effects, thrown into your average game. The combination of great graphics and poor gameplay is accented very well in Amped, however it can be fun to just board down a few runs every now and again. But with the amount of frustration you’ll have to endure, only the most die-hard snowboarding fans will truly love this game, and many of the glaring gameplay, or sound issues will likely deter anyone else. 
