Neuromancer
Member
Sounds amazing:
The demo begins with a lengthy, nerdy preamble about mapping all the world's mountain ranges from NASA data that makes SSX sound worryingly like an over-reaching sim. However, it's not long before we're pelting down a twisting tunnel of ice that is supposedly in the heart of Kilimanjaro's frozen volcano (but looks more like something from Mario Kart crossed with WipEout) while our demonstrator tells us the team's aim is to deliver "Burnout on snow". Phew!
It's a best-of-both-worlds situation. In a "Google Earth-inspired" interface, you can spin a 3D globe and select famous mountains from every one of Earth's major ranges. These will be modelled on the real thing thanks to that satellite data, and completely open for exploration - you can ride anywhere on them from preset drop points in a free ride mode covering vast, open-world areas.
We start with the race inside Kilimanjaro, beginning in the Kibo crater and plunging into its fancifully imagined intestines. In many races, riders start from different points on the mountain before converging on the track; here, Mac, Elise and others start scattered around the crater rim before meeting at the tunnel mouth.
It's fast and vertiginous, but the tracks have been designed with a view to presenting racers with a good deal of freedom across multiple paths. EA Canada expects finding the best shortcuts and fastest or safest lines to add replayability and a sense of adventure to this race mode.
The goal for the trick mode is to capture the style, flow and sense of self-expression of old SSX or the early Tony Hawk games, we're told. You can use either an old-school button configuration or the more modern twin-stick approach; I use the latter when I get to try the mode out and it is very fluid, responsive and slick.
Oh yeah and that's my boy Mac in the picture up top.Even the deadly descent "boss fights" are only so scripted. These nine challenges are summit descents on the "gnarliest terrain that we could find". Each acts as the final challenge of a geographical region and gateway to the next, and each has a particular hazard as its theme: snow, rock, ice, thin air, gravity, fog, wind, whiteout and darkness.
We're at the highest peak in North America, Denali (otherwise known as Mount McKinley) in Alaska, and our enemy is snow. What that means in practice is procedurally generated avalanches created by your own snowboard: everywhere in the game, the terrain is subject to a stability analysis, and the forces you exert on the snow while riding - a heavy landing, a hard carve at high speed - have the potential to loosen snow, creating spray, slough, slides and even different categories of avalanche.