For the next three
hours, we'll be playing Amped 3 for the Xbox 360, published by 2K Sports (a Take-Two Software company) and
developed by Indie Built, Inc.
For this review, I'll be playing devil's advocate. That means that I'm going to write about everything I don't like about the game during our limited experience with it. Even though I may very well like the game, it's my job to bury, not praise Amped 3. For praise, check out Chris's post that's being written at the same time.
Update 1: My work's cut out for me. Just played the intro mission as a pink bunny. I'm finding it hard to dislike a game that has such a good sense of humor about itself, but I'll persevere!
Update 2: Plasticine. The skin on the humans in this game is as plastic as any game ever was. When are we going to see human models that don't look like they were popped out of a barbie doll factory? How about hair that doesn't look like it could be popped on and off, Lego style? It's appropriate that the song playing during the intro ("Blinded by the Light") includes a lyric about "some silicone sister and a manager mister."
Update 3: No sex changes. After the intro mission that you play in a pink bunny suit, the player is presented with a very important choice: male or female. Not wanting to stare at tubby (pictured at right) for the next three hours, I wanted to choose something that'd be a little nicer on the eyes. Now we gotta play through that whole bunny mission again! Boo!
Update 4: Too easy? It's nearly impossible to screw up in this game. Should a newb to snowboarding be able to land railslides that last for hundreds of feet? Shouldn't collisions result in real damage? I want to see broken bones, real fake blood, injured bystanders, and bone-crunching, branch-snapping collisions with trees. And it's said that this is the realistic snowboarding game (the SSX series of snowboarding game includes tons of crazy impossible tricks and stunts).
Update 5: Zilch zen. Some games are purely game play driven: the player becomes one with his character and the controller ceases to become a challenge and instead becomes a conduit through which player desire is translated to on-screen movement. The pleasure of athletic achievement becomes known to the dude sitting on his couch. It's special. In our limited experience so far this evening, Amped 3 never really achieves this tight link between player and character. Button presses seem arbitrarily connected to the snowboarding gymnastics.
Update 6: Fire the QA team. Or give them more time to do their jobs. There are entire stretches of slope when the avatar's legs are buried in snow up to the knees, but there's no wake or disruption of the powder. It's as if she was standing there all night and the snow fell down around her. This happens most frequently in the lift building on the right-hand side at the end of a slope run. Here's another example where QA fell short: the introduction to one mission instructs the player to "score at lease" 5000 points. This is not to say that the game is bug-infested. It hasn't crashed on us yet. But slop is slop. (To be fair to the QA dudes, they may well have logged these bugs, but some exec pushed the game out the door anyway. It don't matter--point is, the game was released with bugs.)
Update 7: Story driven play. I'm now playing in order to advance the game story. The fundamental joy of actually playing the game isn't quite so large as my desire to just see what sort of nutty cut scenes the game's going to show us next. As Chris noted and as I must concede, the game's art direction, dialogue and writing are fantastic. That's what's keeping me playing so far. (That and the fact that I'm blatantly whoring for achievement points.) Still, it's problematic that I'm playing a game in order to unlock non-interactive cinematics. One should want to play a game because the game itself is fun, not as a means of unlocking what are essentially short movie clips, however clever the clips may be.
Update 8: Snow effects. It's said that certain Eskimo languages have, like, 40 words for snow. This isn't actually true, but it makes intuitive sense: people who are around snow all the time will tend to develop very specialized, sophisticated knowledge of it. For that reason, Amped 3's treatment of snow is disappointing. There are only a handful of unique snow textures on the slopes: there's just-groomed, fresh powder, wind-blown ridges, ice-crusted, dirty, and so on, but none of it looks particularly good. Powder, in particular, looks horrible: mushy, undefined, grey. It should scintillate like diamond dust when sun hits it. It should make a different sound against your board as you plow through it. In short, it should act more like snow and less like cotton-wrapped polygons.
Update 9: Look ma, no hands! We haven't run this test on other snowboarding games, but this is ridiculous. I started at the top of a mountain and hit a button to start my descent down the slope. Then I set the controller down and didn't touch it. My character boarded from the top of the mountain to the bottom of it every single time. I could have been asleep. That's just not right!
Conclusion: The game has some serious flaws (outlined above). Even if QA hadn't been cut short, it's hard to know what kind of magic would have been required to turn this pumpkin into a chariot. Games are ultimately supposed to live or die on the quality of their interactive experience. That's exactly what falls short here, no matter how redeeming the game's other qualities.
My rating (after a night of deep dissing): 6.0 / 10
Chris's rating (after a night of boot
licking): 9.0 / 10
Final score: 7.5 / 10
Tonight's gaming session fueled by Yards Love Stout, Yards India Pale Ale, Yards Extra Special Ale, Yards Philly Pale Ale, in multiples thereof.
