The game-play is almost non-existent and the gaming pleasure surely is.
If it's because the distributor and publisher Canal + is really a cable TV company or if it's because Visual studios isn't a very experienced developing studio I can't say, but this game fails in all possible ways. I played through the game and unlocked all tracks and I really feel bad about myself for spending all that time on it.
Graphics:
The three events in this game are similar in the way they play out; they are all seen from a third person perspective behind the character (there are 4 characters to choose from) and they comprise of racing against the clock to reach checkpoints to be awarded extra seconds and so on. The cool thing about this game is that the tracks are in five different continents of the world; Africa, Asia, Japan (which I always thought was a part of Asia…), Europe and America. All three extreme sports get one track on each continent which makes a total of 15 tracks/stages and while the backdrops look almost average, the textures and the gameplay graphics are the worst I have seen on a Playstation. The pop-up is constant and very brutal, the animation of the character is beyond annoying. The main character sways in and out of the screen in an attempt to make it look like the character is going fast. Luckily there is an option to change view to a first person one, but that doesn't help the outrageously bad textures and awful track design. There are parts of the tracks which are haunted by bugs and you need to stay on a certain part of the track to avoid getting caught. Constant frame-rate drops, crashes and broken collision detection make this game the worst programmed game I have ever played on the Playstation. My eyes literally hurt after a few hours but I pressed on. The menus all look boring and the overall design and layout is very bad. Some of the later tracks are a little cooler, like the snowboard race in Japan, but it saves nothing.
5%
Sound:
Now, this is a question of taste of course, I personally don't like dance/trance/goa/techno very much unless the gaming in itself is enhanced by it (like Wipeout for example) but these few tracks, although written by original recording artists exclusively for this title, are horrible, repetitive and badly produced. Why not go for the punk or soft-hardcore that other extreme sports do. At least that works. The "voice acting" is the worst I've ever heard in a game from the uninspired "nooo" when you fall off the edge of a cliff (or according to the broken graphics INTO or THROUGH a cliff) to the "let's go" (which HAS to be heard to be believed. Sega Master System samples anyone?). The in-game effects are scratching sounds on snow and other inconsistencies and are below anyone's standard.
11%
Gameplay
One of the events is almost unplayable (the BMX one) as the collision-detection decided to turn your cyclist around 120 degrees if you nudge a wall or one of the solid rocks (yes, sigh… there are non-solid ones as well) which is incredibly annoying. All the events has these kinds of things going on but it's most apparent in the BMX event. The game-play is almost non-existent and the gaming pleasure surely is. How this could pass ANY kind of quality control or even TESTING is beyond my comprehension. The game actually crashed in the sense that it froze my Playstation console several times during my play-through!
6%
Lastability
Dead before you put the CD in. I sincerely regret playing this game.
2%
Overall
Believe me. Avoid this.
5%