Shaun White Skateboarding – Review

So this month sees Shaun White have a crack at the Skateboarding genre.  Ubisoft make their attempt of trying to gain the crown from Tony Hawk’s and Skate.

Shaun White’s Skateboarding, tries to give the game a bit of a story, Shaun White has been taken captive and you have possession of his skateboard.  The world has been taken over by government who have taken the joy out of life.  Everybody dresses the same, they have no opinions, and the world is completely grey.

Your main focus is to bring back life to what was a vibrant city using your skateboard.  Whilst landing tricks, you will see the colour brought back to you surroundings, boring grey cars change into super cars and business men turn into middle age men with a skateboard!

Other features in the game, are verts and rails, in which you have the ability to shape as you please with the analogue stick

With this you can create a vert with the incline or decline of your liking to reach an area that was otherwise out of bounds.

Sadly, these features fail to make the game anything but ordinary.  In my personal opinion, I play Skateboarding / Snowboarding games for fun, and Shaun White Skateboarding struggles to deliver.  One reason a lot of people used to watch the old videos found on a Tony Hawk game was to watch some of the painful bails, and they used to be carried over into the game, seeing your skater scrape his knees or gash his head open on a rail, with SWS it is very difficult to bail no matter how badly you land, and when you do your character just disappears in a air of bubbles and returns at a set marker.

The city starts grey, and it should be left grey, the missions themselves are pretty boring and tedious, having to do 20 wall plants to remove government propaganda wasn’t very exciting, and some seemed impossible to actually make with the unresponsive controls.

The game seems to have looked firstly at the story, which in a Skateboarding game, is the last thing I am worried about.  I remember cracking open Tony Hawks 2 and being able to jump straight in with some cool tricks and not worry about what is going on the world around me.

I understand that Ubisoft have tried to set the game apart from the others by adding more of a detailed story mode but it seems that due to this the actual skating physics have suffered.

The Good?

• The game features a storyline

The Bad

• Lacks Fun
• Too Forgiving
• Poor Physics