A decent snowboarding title but behind other similiar titles...
Time to put on the bindings and strap on the boots; it’s snowboarding season. Having to live in the shadow of it’s uber-fun older brother on the N64 isn’t an easy task. Avalanche doesn’t take many risks and while it can be fun, sometimes falls flat compared to other boarding games like SSX 3.
Just like its previous incarnation, Avalanche starts you off in an ordinary ski lodge where you can pick from the various gameplay options. The easy-to-use menu layout provides players with a simple way to navigate through the game’s various modes. Once the game mode is selected you can choose your boarder from the list of five available main characters; 1080 alum Akari Hayami, Ricky Winterborn, and Rob Haywood make return appearances and are joined by newcomers Tara Hunter and Kemen Vazquez. All boarders are rated in five categories: speed, acceleration, jump, turning, and balance. Any differences are negligible though and seem to be null once you unlock the more advanced boards.
The main single-player component is once again, as it was in the N64 version, the match race. Fifteen snow-laden courses await you in the easy, medium, and hard modes where you race each course against a randomly chosen opponent. An “extreme” mode is available once you beat the main three difficulties but this mode only includes mirrors of the more difficult trails. The courses themselves are fairly straightforward and tend to run a little short. Most races will be completed within 1-2 minutes; that said, single player can go by fairly quickly depending on your skill level. Load times included, the easy and medium difficulty modes can be beaten in less than 15 minutes each. While the fast-paced races can be invigorating and exciting it leaves something to be desired since there’s not much replay appeal here; this is partially due to their linear nature. Some trails only offer one direction for completion without any secondary paths to race; even the trails that do offer more often only have one alternative route at best. This tends to get fairly tedious and also hampers you in the more advanced difficulties where one fall can result in a loss of the race since you can’t make up for lost time. Did I mention that you can only lose three times in any match race? If you lose more than three times you have to start all over again. You can lose by being beaten or retiring when your damage indicator falls to zero so make sure to be careful out there.
Not all is as bad as I’m making it seem though. Where the courses shine is environment interaction. Board through rotted old shacks and they will crumble; knock over powder kegs and explosions will rock the landscape and create secret tunnels for you to go through. If there’s a ski lodge in your way you can always jump in the window and go right through it. Deer, rabbits, squirrels, and other wildlife will dash across the screen, sometimes getting in your way and knocking you off balance—one of the new features of Avalanche. When knocked off balance you don’t necessarily fall over, but have to quickly rotate the control stick to stay up. This is an easy trick that you will learn to love since falling can cause you precious seconds.
The main environmental effect is what Avalanche is marketed on, you guessed it, avalanches. The final race for each difficulty mode is a race against the mountain itself. As you speed down the mountain snow will come tumbling down. A “danger meter” at the top of the screen lets you know how you are doing. Stay ahead of the avalanche and you should breeze through the course. This is much easier said than done though. Most of the challenge modes are spent in what I’d like to call the avalanche “limbo.” It’s the portion of the avalanche where you will have huge chunks of ice flying by your head and sheets of snow will obstruct your view. If you fall down once or go too slow you will wipeout when the snow overtakes you. All three avalanche races make the adrenaline pump, in fact you don’t really have time to think during them. Steering wildly at the nearest opening in the ice canyons is what you will be reduced to; thinking, in this case, causes failure.
In addition to the match races there are the time trial, trick attack, and gate challenge modes. Time trial lets you race alone through the tracks trying to get the fastest time possible. Also there are pieces of coins scattered throughout the courses; five per course. Get all five and you complete and receive a coin which is used to unlock more advanced boards for your characters. Trick attack is basically the same as it was on the N64 version of 1080. You have the air make, the half-pipe, and the terrain park. Jump and trick your way on to the high score table. The gate challenge is the mode which will help you the most in the game. Follow a series of gates, usually leading through shortcuts and the fastest ways in the level, to complete the course. This is a training aide of sorts and helps you figure out the tricks to each level. The gate challenge also helps you unlock specialty boards like the original Nintendo controller. By completing a courses challenge and getting the new high score you earn a trophy. The more trophies you have the more advanced specialty board you unlock.
The controls for Avalanche are fairly straight forward. Use the control stick to steer and stop your character, acceleration can be increase by pressing down the left shoulder button and crouching although this will hamper your ability to turn. Jumping is handled through the A button, holding and pressing it down fills a meter in the center of the screen. Release A when the meter is full and you will get the highest jump possible. Hold down A for too long though and the meter will reset.
The lackluster trick system uses the B button, which is used with the control stick for various grabs, and the right shoulder button, which is held down while rotating the control stick to perform 180s, 360s, and the like. The trick system and the controls in general seem slightly sluggish and slow. Characters are responsive to the control stick but could be a little more sensitive to the touch. Tricks are where the game really becomes average. Whereas in the N64 version, performing 720s and 1080s was a big accomplishment by having to pull of a specific button mashing combination the implementation of the control stick seems to cheapen these moves. Combos are handled primarily through grabs, which have to be done slowly because of a pre-set combo system that actually forces players to do tricks much slower than they actually can be done. Since jumping doesn’t give you that much air you don’t have much time to perform many tricks. In the original 1080 combos were executed easily and had big point payoffs. Rarely will you ever get a combo reward for doing multiple tricks in one jump. The trick tutorial included in the original is also missing in this game, in all probability because the tricks aren’t that difficult to perform, sadly.
Graphically, Avalanche is drop-dead gorgeous. The characters and the boards have a high-poly finish to them and the environments are beautiful. Snow will accumulate on your character if they are in deep powder or if they happen to fall. In snowstorms, small flakes of snow will hit the camera lens and melt away in a very nicely done water effect. Speed lines will fly past you at increased speeds and as you descend the highest peaks into the clouds below your surroundings go from spectacularly bright to dark and desolate in a spectacular transition. The avalanches have sheets of snow falling left and right and look very realistic with boulders flying and trees being knocked down. You probably won’t appreciate the avalanche until you save and watch the replay of the race.
Avalanche features a soundtrack fitting any snowboarding game. You will have the ability to choose up to about 40 tracks from various punk and alternative rock artists. You start off with a limited selection but more songs are unlocked when you complete the match races. There aren’t that many other sounds in the game. The characters themselves only say a few minor lines; the helicopter pilot speaks more in the than any of the characters do. The chirping of the damage indicator (when it gets too low) does tend to get frustratingly annoying rather quickly also.
Multiplayer almost seems like an afterthought in Avalanche. For starters you can only choose six of the fifteen courses available; none of the avalanche sequences are selectable either. You will be brought through the standard split-screen mode which can accommodate up to four players. The real major blow to multiplayer is the falling frame rate that occurs when playing with three or four players. The game is noticeably less smooth than with one or two players. Given this graphical shortfall, and that the six courses aren’t particularly long, you’d find better multiplayer value in SSX 3. LAN play is also possible in Avalanche although you can still only race with four boarders which doesn’t seem to justify all the hassle of going through a LAN at all.
When all is said and done, Avalanche is a decent game; just decent. It doesn’t live up to its older brother at all and its simplified trick system is a big disappointment. It’s not a bad game though by far, the fast pace of the courses and the amount of unlock able content have a fair amount of appeal. Fans of snowboarding and fans of the original 1080 will find more than enough to warrant the purchase of this title.