Reviews// Amped 3 (Xbox 360)

After a while, the game mechanic begins to make sense, and you spend less time wondering what the hell is going on, and more time progressing through the frankly insane story-based gameplay.

The basic storyline is that you and your buddies want to go to Peru for the awesome Andean summer snow (obviously, it would be winter in the Andes, and that was said with a very northern hemispherocentric viewpoint). Anyhow, our friends need cash, or sponsorship, or a lift or something - I'm still sketchy on the details, and the game couldn't make me care enough to find out - to enable them to get there. You have to progress through a number of events, challenges and media call outs, in each you'll be asked to perform in a generally radical manner to either stack up points, impress bystanders or hurt yourself badly. Yeah, we know that last bit sounded like the kind of random 'funny' thing reviewers shove on the end of a list when they have appended an 'and' but run out of things to say. But this time, we actually mean it. There are challenges where you have to travel down the slope on a ringo, tea tray or other random slippery thing, and smash into the scenery in a way that causes as much damage to your person as possible. Rocks are good, trees less so. Big fluffy piles of baby-bottom-soft powder are useless, learn from our experience.

While the storyline is fractured and frankly uninvolving, this doesn't detract seriously from the fun you'll have playing Amped. The time you spend in Amped doing varial revert McDuff twistplants will be as enjoyable as in any snowboarding game (moreso than SSX). The soundtrack is kicking, featuring 150 toons from all your favourite bands (unless you don't like hip-hop, emo and skate-punk, in which case you're wrong, but you can add your own tunes into the mix from either the Xbox360 hard disk or an atteached device like a PSP or iPod). So this all sounds "totally bitchin' dude" as we snowboarders are reputed to say.

But still the user interface, which adds so much to the game with its iconoclastic and idiosyncratic animations and dialogue, keeps getting in the way. Eventually, when you've impressed all the bystanders on the current mountain, you have to travel to another mountain to continue the narrative. When you unlock the new mountain, you are given clear instructions on how to get there - but the thing is, this is right in the middle of a botching run, and the last thing you want to do is read instructions. So you flip past it, or ignore it or whatever. Then, later, when you come to want, no... need to travel to the other mountain... well - how do you do it again? Oh, you have to use the pause menu and go to the main menu. Not particularly user friendly. You can move from one resort to another using the triggers while on the piste-map screen, moving mountains would have been better done using the shoulder buttons.

There is a tutorial - but it's linear and you can't flip to the next screen by pressing any buttons - so you have to sit and wait till it gets to the bit you are interested in.

And while we're on the subject of the interface - it all looks a little fuzzy, as if its been poorly rezzed up from SDTV resolutions - this isn't what we've been getting accustomed to with other XBox 360 games and it's not the HDTV gaming revolution we were promised. It would have been easy enough for 2K to have done high res versions of these screens as well as low res ones, or to have rezzed the HD ones down for people on last gen TVs.

SPOnG rating:B+
Overall, Amped is a great game. Could have been better... but then what couldn't. The snowboarding parts are great, and you'll need to hone your skills to progress through the storyline and onto bigger and gnarlier hills. The sledding, snow-mobiling and hang gliding are pleasant enough distractions but the interface is both brilliant and poor in equal measure... which stops the game reaching its true potential.