Stoked is a must have game for your 360
The game starts out with you as a non sponsored rider aiming to become a pro. After spending time exploring three huge, and I mean HUGE, mountains you begin your career as a professional rider. You earn fame points by completing challenges. There are several different types of challenges you face up front: Stick A Trick, Trick Or Die, and Session. Doing enough of these challenges will earn enough fame to unlock sponsors and a first group of media challenges.
After you are sponsored things really open up including park like events and two additional mountains. There is a pro rider on each mountain that can also be unlocked once you complete his or her checklist of mini-challenges.
One of the things that I liked the best was the ability to fly the helicopter around. You earn a license to fly the helicopter by beating all 8 of the Session challenges on a mountain. You can use the helicopter fly mode to set new drop points for yourself and for friends in multiplayer games.
The multiplayer mode is really cool. There are a wide diversity of game play types that are very different from the types of challenges you encounter in single player. Really liked how the single player mode and the multiplayer mode seems to be very tightly integrated so you can come in and out of multiplayer games as you see fit.
The music and sound in the game is good; it is filled with a wide variety of diffeent genres and bands. Some names may be recognizable while others may be new to you. I thought the soundtrack was good and caught on that there were three additional classes of music that were turned off by default that you can turn on if you like. Very different kind of music: classic rock sounding, movie theme sounding, and video game sounding. Not the same type of music as the rest of the core but a good change nontheless. I would have liked to see a larger offering in some key categories like Reggae and Trance and man would it have been great to get some authentic 80s music. Oh well, this didn't hamper my experience one bit.
Game play wise I really liked the diversity of challenges and I appreciated the skate like controls. I preferred them to the button combinations that have been in other extreme sports products and I was also happy that the controls felt fluid and responsive. Though it took a bit of time to learn the tricks I found that through play I almost had the tricks memorized (by controller layout). It would have been helpful to have controller graphics next to trick lists in challenges where tricks were requirements. Maybe this is something that can be done for a sequel.
I liked the backcountry aspect and the fact that I could ride anywhere I wanted. It would be great to have a little more man made stuff to trick off of. Not to the point that you see in other boarding games like SSX, Amped 3, or Shaun White, but a little more placement of this would be a good thing to see and add to the already strong game play.
The game is 40 bucks.
When you add up all of the cool features, the price, and compare Stoked to other snowboarding games it is very apparent that Stoked is the strongest and, if you are anything like me, you'll come to quickly realize that it satisfies just about every wish you've ever wanted to have in a snowboarding game.