Amped 3 - The Review
So why the hell does this game only get an 8.1? i hear you ask! Well although Amped 3 is on the whole a good game there is so much room for improvement - heres what i liked and what put me off a bit;
Pros:
+ It's craziness, really it's the craziest game you'll ever play.
+ The snow and mountians look gorgeous
Cons:
- Story mode is pretty weak
- Graphic's could be much nicer
The basic storyline to the game is pretty weak as i said, basically you are on a snowboaridng holiday with your buddies when you trip money is stolen, so you have to get the money back and re-unite with your crew, but it doesn't end there, thtas all i'm going to say as i don't want to give too much away.
Amped 3 sucesses in a lot of ways, one thing which will attract you to the game is it's sheer craziness, at first you wonder why it's jsut really weird but, it definately adds value to the game as the cut-scenes are hilarious. There is a total of 8 resorts to explore, each very different and usually divided into three parts, there's lots of things you can do on the mountain if you can't bothered with the main storyline, you have to pull off Media Callouts - these are just like tricks for the camera, like you have to do a spining or a rail trick for example. Then it moves on to some more 'crazy' stuff, like collecting kitty glitter (err yeah) tricking through hippy circles, and snow quests (just beat the hi-score basically). A few of these i really find funny - in particular the Trauma Quests in which you sit on a sled then jump off and try and hurt yourself really bad, its incredibly fun. To add more replay value to all this the 'quests' can be beaten again and again to acquire and higher score or even better a bronze, silver or gold medal. Although there could be a better range of 'sub quests' to beat the game feels unusually non-reppetitive, i found myself really surprised that i don't get bored doing these challenges. But - if you do get bored you can always try and get people 'stoked' no, this doenst mean soaked, its a term used in most extreme sports for when someone think's somethink is totally crazy/radical etc. These are great you must build up a meter by doing tricks and then you'll be in awesomess mode where you have a time limit to impress the minimum number of bystanders on the snow, That's always good fun doing.
Ok, so there are some bad points among those, though there aren't many they do certainly damage the overall rating i gave. The graphics are nice, but they aren't the best, the character models are spot on though, but there are a few glitches, just ride into a mountain and you'll see what im talking about, that pretty much sucks. The control system feel's great but you don't get that sense of speed like you did get in SSX on Tour, it's quite dissapointing really, and sometime you are bashing your control stick because your character won't do a manual sort of trick, now that really bites. The soundtrack to the game is just horrific im sorry to say, i didn't like any of the songs used, and if you did like them well thats your choice, i though they sucked pretty bad, but still i've got my MP3 to listen to while i play so it's not that bad, having said that the character voices are awesome. What Amped 3 doesn't do so well is its frustration mode, now there isn't a real frustration mode there it's just it doesn't help..... For instance I had to get up this relaly big hill in 10 seconds goign through these gate things that give you extra time, it was quite hard and i was running out of time, i went through a gate but it didnt acknowelage i did, so i ended up failing the mission, it annoyed me a lot. Also there was a media call-out on a rock and i kept falling off the rock because it gives you no control when you are on there =(.
There isn't much else to tell you all, the game is definately worth checking out, especially if you are even remotely into snowbaording or and extreme sport for that matter, it delivers very well and is utterly enjoyable, weird, but fun. Maybe not worth it's £49.99 price tag, as its not the best 360 game out there, but now it's £17.99, a total bargain if you ask me. I rate this game 8.1/10