Amazon.com Review
Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding ditches the conventional racing modes of other snowboarding games and instead focuses on freestyle action–in other words, executing tricks with style. The excellent trick system and accurate physics make for tight gameplay across the board. The game sports a robust career mode as well as quick start and multiplayer modes.
Career mode is divided into four parts: High Score, Media, Sponsor, and Pro Ride. High Score challenges the player to pile on as many tricks as possible. Media requires the player to execute tricks at certain points where a photographer is waiting. Sponsor mode focuses on a particular group of tricks. For instance, one sponsor may favor grinds over airs, so players better make sure to grind everything in site to win the sponsor’s gear. This mode is also the least forgiving, as it’s the only one where mistakes detract from the overall score. Finally, Pro Ride has the player follow and out-trick one of 17 professional riders in a follow-the-leader manner. Multiplayer mode allows up to four players to participate in a round robin tournament with numerous selectable conditions.
Graphically, the game isn’t as sharp as EA’s SSX Tricky, nor are the physics and pace as extreme. That isn’t to say the game looks bad. The real-life locations of Stratton, Brighton, Snow Summit, and more look great. The soundtrack features more than 50 songs in a wide array of genres, including electronica, emo, hip-hop, rap, punk, ska, and reggae. Players can also opt to use their own soundtracks off the Xbox hard drive, letting them snowboard to Journey and Air Supply as nature intended. –Raymond M. Padilla
Pros:
- Excellent career mode
- Strong physics and trick system
- Vast soundtrack
Cons:
- Might be too slow for typical extreme-sports fans
- Weaker graphics than the competition
- Boring sound effects
Product Description
Open freestyle ridin. Forget miles of barren wasteland and tight tunnel racers. Trick off of a huge variety of jumps and rails on wide-open mountains. Spectacular real mountains. Ride the runs on real mountain resorts: Utah’s Brighton, Vermont’s Strattong and California’s Snow Summit. Be a snowboarding media star. Get enough globa exposure to become one of the world’s snowboarding media superstars. Amp it up with the most music of any game, ever. No more endless repetition of the s
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I just purchased the game and I absolutely love the game. The graphics like all x-box games look like your watching a live match it looks realistic and plays realistic. The game is fun, fast, but very hard too control if you are new to the snowboarding genre. In my opinion the game has a steep learning curve. this is definitely 5 stars
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:51 pm
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Midget
It is so fun it is to fun I would buy it it has great graphics it is fun for all ages Fun for hours and Hours it is the best game eaver made from a company and is for two players…
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:50 pm
5.0 out of 5 stars
AWESOME
I like this game a lot because it lets you do flips and not many other games let you do that!
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:17 pm
This is not a game so much as an excercise in addiction control and you will fail! The need to play this tugs at you every few minutes when your XBox is turned off. This is by far the best XBox launch title other than the magnificent Halo. But the difference between the two is that Amped has a tremendous amount of replay. Graphically this title go’s far beyond anything else ever made. It’s also one of the first XBox titles to take advantage of the built in Hard Drive by storing all the environmental data such as Trees and backgrounds. So there will be literally no popup or distance fogging commonly used to improve frame rates. You can literally see forever particularly on the huge mountains such as the Altibahn. There are so many different levels of bump mapping and textures on the snow alone it makes your head spin. There is plowed snow, Poweder, lined, Ice, packed, you name it.
Gameplay is where it’s at though. This is the way Snowboarding should be. Total freestyle. Not some SSX clone running down unreal tracks and knocking others down along the way. This is all about choosing your own line, and pulling incredible moves.
Do yourself a favor, if you own the XBox, buy this now. This truly shows why the Xbox is the most powerfull console created.
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:47 pm
4.0 out of 5 stars
My first Xbox sports game
I recently bought an Xbox and am slowly building up my game collection. I had a demo of “Amped2″ and loved it.
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:02 pm
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amped
This is by far the best snowboarding game on the market. It is easy to play and the concept isn’t hard to grasp at all.
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:11 pm
1.0 out of 5 stars
Worst game ever made.
At least give us a decent two player mode.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:22 am
I’ve owned Amped for four weeks (over 60 hours of play), and I rented SSX Tricky for five days (over 20 hours of play). I’m a skier, not a boarder, and I love Amped. SSX Tricky has its good points too, but with that game the characters break dance on their boards and can’t wander off the given path. In Amped the boarder is firmly attached to his bindings, and behaves more realistically. If you want a racing game with cartoon-like characters, go for SSX Tricky. If you want a fun single-player game get Amped. One funny addition in Amped is the taunts from the other boarders when you bite a trick: ‘You dropped your pocket!’
Pros:
- Fun! High replay value. Either go for high scoring tricks, or wander the mountain looking for snowmen to run over. Or ride the entire length of a ski lift cable.
- More realistic physics than SSX Tricky (OK, so no one can jump 50 feet high), but you can stop anywhere on the mountain, and pick your own path down the mountain.
- Beautiful graphics: whisps of snow, shadows, sparkling snow, hard ice
- Customize the background music to CD’s you rip to the XBox hard drive
Cons:
- No simultaneous multi-player: you take turns.
- No time challenges, no gate racing
- Tough learning curve if you have Tony Hawk trick habits
June 4th, 2009 at 12:57 am
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best if you are the patient type.
I personally enjoyed this game a lot more than any of the SSX games. The tricking is simpler but deep, the soundtrack rocks (with over 200 songs) although i use the custom…
June 4th, 2009 at 6:43 am
5.0 out of 5 stars
At last a CORE snowboarding game!!!
I would just like to thank Microsoft for creating such an incredible game. I’ve waited so long for a true core snowboarding game like this to come along, the wait was definitely…
June 4th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
5.0 out of 5 stars
A reviewer from a non-skier, non-boarder
HiI don’t ski, don’t snowboard, and I’ve never played games of this genre before. I recently got interested in SSX3 from seeing a review about it online; so I tried out a…
June 4th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
5.0 out of 5 stars
You cannot continue to live with out this game.
This game is awesome. It may take a few minutes to learn the controls but after that it is all good. You can board to your own soundtrack.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
5.0 out of 5 stars
I got AMPED when i got this, you will too
I got this game along with Mat Hoffman pro BMX 2 for my first games for the Xbox, and damn, amped blows Mat Hoffman clear out of the water.