SSX Tricky - Skater Reviews (Xbox, PS2)

Short version: SSX Tricky is the second game in EA’s SSX snowboarding series, played here on the Xbox and PS2. It’s more of a remix of the first game than a true sequel. The level design, controls and uber tricks are great, but the World Circuit makes you race the same course over and over, and that got old fast. It might be worth a few bucks if you have good memories of it. Otherwise, I’d try a later SSX game or Amped 2.

So far I’ve covered a few different snowboarding games this winter, but now I’m going to take a look at SSX Tricky on the Xbox and also the PS2. I’m usually a skateboarding channel, and I talk about where tricks came from and all kinds of other skateboarding topics, but for the winter, I’m taking a look at some snowboarding games.

My first next-gen game

Back when the PS2 was released, you might remember all the shortages. Stores just couldn’t keep the system in stock. One time, my mom was at the store and saw one. Some other lady had taken it to the counter and asked them to hold it for her, so she could go get her checkbook or something. My mom walked up, pointed to the policies sign on the wall, and asked if they were even allowed to hold something for a customer. They said no… and she bought it out from under her and brought it home to surprise me and my brother.

But… we didn’t have any games. We played Spider-Man for PS1 on it all night. The next day we convinced my dad to bring us SSX. That game was my first “next gen” game, and also my first snowboarding game if you don’t count 2Xtreme.

So when I got some suggestions to review an SSX game, I jumped at the opportunity, and I decided to try Tricky, which is the second game in the series. It’s kind of a remix of the first game instead of a true sequel. I never played it at the time for whatever reason, and I was excited to give it a shot.

World Circuit and racing

If you aren’t familiar with the game in general, here’s what it’s about. You have all of these different characters to choose from, and they’re all really well voice acted: David Arquette, Lucy Liu, Macy Gray, Billy Zane… You pick a character and do some racing.

The World Circuit mode is the one you want to play to unlock stuff in the game. When you start a race, it lets you know who your friends and enemies are. I don’t know what this does exactly, but your enemies are more likely to try to knock you over. I don’t think friends do anything… but to be fair, I just punched everybody, so I made enemies really fast. You risk them coming after you, but knocking someone down fills your boost meter, so it’s worth it. Sometimes they talk crap to you after a race.

Trick controls

The other way to fill your boost meter is by doing tricks, so let’s talk about the trick controls. To wind up for a spin or flip, you hold down the jump button and a direction on the D-pad. Usually you steer with the joystick, so you lose steering control for a second when you switch. Then you let go of jump and hold the direction to keep spinning. You can add in grabs by using the triggers and face buttons in different combinations.

You can do slides by jumping on a rail. It will automatically lock you in, but it can be really hard to get these to work. You’ll miss them a lot of the time. To balance, you move left and right on the left joystick, which makes you shift from side to side on the rail. It’s much easier in a boardslide or lipslide compared to a 50-50, because you have the whole length of the board. Hitting left and right on the D-pad will make you spin, but you can get yourself into some weird positions trying to work the D-pad and joystick at the same time.

Level design

That’s about all there is to the tricks, but that’s plenty, because there’s too much other stuff to worry about during an actual race. There are alternate paths, obstacles and shortcuts to keep an eye out for. Big glass panes show you where to cut through the course, and the color shows you how big of a shortcut it is: blue is small and red is big. But there was one that I kept trying that basically took me nowhere, and I kept getting stuck. I don’t know if I needed a higher speed stat to clear it, but it seems like they kind of messed this one up.

In general, though, the design of the levels is really good, and all the alternate paths help mix things up. There are parts with really tight paths, or icy sections. There’s one area where you can choose to hit the ramp to get points and earn boost, or just ride straight down the middle to get through faster. There’s also a high-risk area where you can either air over all the barriers in the halfpipe, or try to ride down the middle and narrowly get through all the passages. You can try different things on different runs and refine your technique.

That’s especially true in the later levels, like the one in Tokyo. It’s like a giant pinball machine. You can ride around on these water slide type of things, which keep you going kind of straight so you avoid obstacles on the course below. Or if you enter the fan thing the right way, you can actually do a slide over that whole section of the level.

Further down, there are walls that you have to open by pushing buttons. You can also make some poles go back into the ground and smooth it out. This level is when the game is at its best. Completely over the top, ridiculous and completely impossible in real life. There are speed boosters, giant fans, huge things that move around and can hit you…

Polish and glitches

I always think the white flash is funny. A lot of Xbox games have stuff like that where it doesn’t fit, because the game is in HD and the white fade-out thing is in standard def. They’ll forget to upscale certain assets when they port it from PS2. But this game isn’t even in HD, so it’s just weird that it’s got that glitch.

Aside from that small thing, I didn’t run into any other glitches. The frame rate drops a tiny bit from time to time, but it’s not really noticeable. The game engine is really solid and everything feels polished.

Plus, the control is really good too. The steering and the carving feel good, the ice feels like ice, and it’s rare that something goes wrong that feels like it wasn’t your fault.

It’s important that the design and controls are good, because you’re going to be playing these levels over and over and over.

The circuit problem

You know how a circuit mode works in most games, like Mario Kart or even Gran Turismo? You race on a few different tracks and get a medal at the end. If you get first place 3 times and third place once, chances are you’ll still get the gold, because all the races are weighted.

SSX is totally different. Instead of all of that, you’re just racing the exact same course over and over. It’s qualifier, semifinals, finals. A race can take around 4 minutes, so it can take about 12 minutes to get through a single course.

The big frustration is that your first 2 races are worthless. If you get first place in those two but place second in the final, you still get a silver. Or worse, you can get first place twice and then completely blow the last race. Maybe you get stuck somewhere or you take the wrong path. Maybe you made too many enemies and they keep knocking you down this one time. Or in my case, a fan blew me up into the air and wasted a bunch of time right before the finish line. Now you have to replay the level 3 more times. This happened to me fairly often. I don’t mind replaying these levels 6 or 9 times, but I’d rather they be mixed into an actual circuit and not back to back. The Tokyo level has 3 laps in each round, so it’s actually 9 times per attempt.

This is the one major flaw in the game that really got me annoyed with it. Going back to unlock some more levels started to feel like a chore after a while.

When you do eventually win, you get stat points that you can give your character: speed, edging, tricks and stability. Every now and then you’ll also gain a rank, going from amateur to pro and then star and veteran and stuff like that.

Showoff mode

OK, so I wasn’t exactly blown away by the race modes, but racing isn’t the name of the game. It’s TRICKY. And the game has a “showoff” event mode as well.

In this mode, there are a bunch of extra obstacles in all the levels, like rails and extra ramps and stuff like that. There are also colored snowflakes, which give you different multipliers based on their size. This new stuff makes the levels play a lot differently. Also, there are no other racers to compete with, just a high score. There is technically a timer, but it’s not a big deal. It’s just there to make sure you don’t cheat like I did, just trying to hit the same halfpipe for a while to rack up points. You do still have to keep moving through the levels and not bail too much, or you’ll lose your momentum.

These events start really easy but get hard quickly. You have to mix up your tricks so you don’t get penalized for repeating, and you have to get better at slides. There isn’t a balance meter, really, but you fall off if you end up leaning too far to one side. It can be tough planning out the flips too: making sure you have the right amount of air time and you flip at the right angle, so you can come around and land it instead of spinning around like a top on your head.

Uber tricks

But the biggest draw of the game, what really sets it apart from other similar racing titles, is what happens when you fill the boost, or adrenaline, meter.

You unlock all your uber tricks, which are basically your Tony Hawk special tricks, except that they’re completely insane. Breakdancing on your board, unhooking and doing kickflips, and all kinds of other crazy stuff becomes available. They take a ton of airtime, and for me, it’s more of a hassle to try to do one in a race, because you never know how much airtime you’ll get. But in trick mode, there are a ton of big ramps you can use. You can also spin and flip when you do them, which makes them even crazier and harder to land.

When you do an uber trick, you fill out one of the letters in TRICKY at the top of the meter. If you manage to fill up the whole word, you’ll get permanent boost and the ability to do uber tricks whenever you want.

When you beat all of the events, you’ll unlock a few stages that you can only play in free ride mode. They’re pretty cool, especially the mega park course. With no time limit, you can actually take a break and hit the same obstacle a few times. It might have been cool to get this one as a training level at the beginning of the game, though, so you could use it to learn how the game works.

Is SSX Tricky worth playing today?

So SSX Tricky might not have been the best game in the series for me to play. Since it wasn’t numbered, I actually thought it was later in the series. I might have done better picking out another one to play for the channel. Which game in the series is the best? And is the reboot any good? I don’t think I’m going to do another SSX game this winter, but there’s always next year.

So is this game worth playing today? You know, I didn’t get to test this part again, but I remember having a lot of fun playing head to head with friends. If you’ve got good memories of that too, it might be worth playing for a few bucks. Otherwise, I would recommend one of the later games, or maybe even Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam. The PS2 version is supposed to be a bit too easy, but it’s not a bad game if you think of it like SSX on a skateboard. I have a full review of the Wii version on the channel.

But if you’re mostly in it for the tricks and you want something a little more serious, I would check out the Amped series, especially Amped 2, and also Infinite Air.