Wakeboarding Unleashed Featuring Shaun Murray Preview

It's hard to argue with the success that Activision has enjoyed with its line of extreme sports titles. Though clearly the flagship franchise has always been the company's Tony Hawk line, each following series--including Matt Hoffman's Pro BMX, Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer, and Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder--has been successful in its own right, whether it be critically, financially, or both. The latest addition to Activision's roster comes in the form of Wakeboarding Unleashed Featuring Shaun Murray, a wakeboarding game that borrows heavily from preceding Activision sports titles but also contains a number of inventive and unique elements. We recently got to take a look at a near-final build of Wakeboarding Unleashed for the PlayStation 2, and, to put it simply, the game is looking great.

If you've ever played a Tony Hawk game before, you should be able to get the hang of Wakeboarding Unleashed's control scheme pretty easily. The X button serves as the jump button, with square and circle executing grab and flip tricks, respectively, and triangle executing grinds. As this is a wakeboarding game, movement through the water is reliant on a motorboat that you tag along behind. To pull off tricks, you will need to swing around from side to side, catching air off the wake that trails behind the boat, as well as the various ramps and other objects that can be tricked off in each level. The L2 button also allows you to detach yourself from the boat so you can grind on or jump off ramps that are off the beaten path. This control system is quite intuitive, and just about anybody should be able to master it fairly quickly.

Wakeboarding Unleashed has many of the standard modes you would expect from an Activision sports title, with the primary focus being the career mode. In it, you'll begin by choosing from one of several real-life professional wakeboarders, including Cobe Mikacich, Collin Wright, Dallas Friday, Parks Bonifay, Darin Shapiro, Tara Hamilton, and Shaun Murray. Once you've chosen your boarder, you go through a brief tutorial to learn some of the more direly necessary mechanics of the game and then set out on a trek across numerous locations, unlocking new levels and stat points for your rider as you polish off level goals.

The goals in Wakeboarding Unleashed are structured much like they are in the Tony Hawk games, but with a couple of twists. For starters, during the game, the boat you're being dragged behind travels along a set route, so you'll be moving around the level along a specific path. Unfortunately, you cannot just ride around the level in an endless loop, as you'll have a groove meter to worry about. The groove meter steadily decreases as your run progresses, though it can be increased slightly by performing impressive tricks and combos. The moral of the groove meter story is that you'll only have a few opportunities at most to achieve each goal per run, so you'll have to budget your time wisely. Aside from the standard in-level goals, each level has a number of side objectives and gaps that must be addressed as well. Each side objective sets you up in a specific part of the level and orders you to perform any number of tasks, ranging from grinding on a specific ordering of rails in a set amount of time to performing specific tricks over set areas.

Wakeboarding Unleashed's multiplayer component supports only two players, but it contains four different types of play. Trick attack is a trick battle where the player with the highest score at the end of the game wins. In HORSE, you begin by completing a trick, and then your opponent has six seconds to match it, and vice versa. Tug-o-war is similar to trick attack, but rather than measuring score, the game rewards the best player with an increasing length of rope, and whoever has the most rope at the end is victorious. The most interesting multiplayer game, however, is clearly the co-op mode, in which one player takes control of the boarder and the other steers the boat. This mode takes away the unyielding nature of the CPU driving and lets you explore the levels in much more detail.

Graphically, Wakeboarding Unleashed is looking extremely solid, though it is not without a few minor hitches. Most impressive in the game is its use of water effects, which is absolutely stunning. The game contains some of the best water texturing seen to date, and the animations for splashing and the wake coming off the boat are nearly seamless. The character models in the game also looked quite good and animated nicely. All the game's levels are well designed, with lots of hidden areas and cool interactive elements. Unfortunately, there were a few clipping issues in various sections of the levels, but nothing that caused any serious problems.

Not all the sound effects in the build we saw were final, but from what we could hear, the game does a solid job in the audio department. The water effects in particular were especially nice, with some very realistic sounds for splashing and for your board cutting through the water. The most intriguing thing about the game's audio presentation, however, has to be its soundtrack. Shucking the current industry standard of throwing as many well-known bands as possible into the fold (no matter how ill-suited), Wakeboarding Unleashed's soundtrack doesn't really contain any of today's major artists, instead relying on a more indie- and classic-rock-inspired roster of bands, including the Pixies, Mountain, the J. Geils Band, the Stooges, the Flaming Lips, and Van Halen, just to name a few.

When compared with the previous builds of the game we've seen, Wakeboarding Unleashed in its current state is a vast improvement. The game contains loads of addictive gameplay elements, combined with well-done visuals and a very unique soundtrack. Fans of the sport of wakeboarding, or Activision's style of extreme sports games, should find plenty to appreciate in Wakeboarding Unleashed when it comes out for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox this June. Expect a full review of the game very soon.