^^ This pretty much sums up my current feeling about the game, after getting it today and putting a few hours into it.
Things I like:
- It's snowboarding
- The graphics are pretty solid
- You can pull of some cool tricks, even if it's not as arcade-y as I usually like
- There's lots of terrain to explore
Things I don't like:
- The meter that fills up whenever you're snowboarding on rock or stone. It fills up regardless of how level the rock is or how fast you're going. And if you snowboard across a rough patch, hit a patch of snow, but then hit a 1-foot patch of rock before your bar depletes you still tumble. It's annoying, not realistic, but also not arcade-friendly. I don't get who this is supposed to appease.
- The trick system feels iffy to me. Namely, there are times when I'm prepping to jump and I manage to not get enough height to execute a trick despite being certain that I timed it right.
- Bouncing off this, I hate the lack of a pre-wind for doing rotations. Having to ensure the jump before I can start doing tricks provides a minor delay that I don't get the point of.
- Not being able to reset my rider if I take a fall. Maybe I missed the button for this in the button layout menu, but as of now I haven't figured out a way to do a quick reset if I fall. And it's made all the worse if I'm falling down a slope because my character will just roll and roll and roll.
- (Playing on PS4) the lack of 60fps is disappointing. I understand that it's an open world game that has to render a lot, but the lower framerate just feels like a hindrance playing it on the PS4.
- Always-online. Seriously, why does this game need to be always online? Every time I start it up I have to wait longer for it to connect to the servers regardless of whether I plan on doing anything social or not. It's dumb.
- It'll sound weird, but I feel like there's no sense of character or narrative. I know, I know - it's a snowboarding game. But I don't feel any sense of progression so far despite having completed several challenges and being at level 10. There's no anticipation of "Oh, that currently locked run looks fun. I can't wait to unlock it." Maybe part of this can be rolled up into...
- Generic identity. Again, I get it - not every game needs to be SSX. But so far, this game just seems so bland to me when it comes to fun or personality. Skate had a more technical approach to its gameplay and it still had a great sense of identity. SSX was far more arcade-y, but again - it had an identity. This just feels oddly generic so far. It's not bad, but it's not great.
We'll see if this game sticks. I mostly got it because of the dearth of snowboarding games on the market and it looked interesting enough in the videos. But playing it... yeah, I dunno. So far it's neither awful nor great. It's just okay.