Stoked is a quality snowboarder and delivers a lot of things that people who don't snowboard will still enjoy
Stoked is the lightweight from unknown developers going against the heavyweight in Ubisoft with SW snowboarding... and Stoked won. There are a lot of things to like in SW but Stoked is a better game overall.
Starting with the career, you begin as a nobody trying to become a legend, by beating challenges, media photo shoots, other pros. There are five mountains each with 8 sides to them, with 10 challenges on each side. Going back to SW, Stoked has 80 challenges per mountain,(not including media and sponsor challenges), so times by 5 is 400. SW had around 15 challenges per mountain maybe, times by 4 is 60.
The challenges are good, some repetition though.
The controls for Stoked can be difficult at first but are actually fairly easy once you get good at it. The hardest part is when your in challenge and it asks for a certain trick and you dont know which way to move the analog to make that grab. But you can easily open the grab bible and find it.
The game focuses on seperating you into either a hucker or stylish rider. Both are well balanced and have well balanced rewards so going either way isnt an advantage or disadvantage.
All the challenges in the game, if you are decent at the controls, are easy. This is why I set the difficulty in the beginning to easy. A lot of the challenges you can get the required amount of points before you even get to the spot where it says to get the points. The only difficult challenges would be a couple of the pros challenges where you have to remember a lot of different grabs and spins without missing a gate.
Along with challenges, is getting sponsored, something that should of been in SW considering hes loaded with sponsors. Stoked has a lot of generic clothes to begin with and some branded clothes and boards you get when you pick a sponsor. There is some variety, but the selection is nothing like SW which had tons of Burton, Special Blend,etc. SW only had like 5 brands though which was dissapointing unlike Stoked where you can get sponsored by brands like Burton, Tech 9, Oakley, Dragon, Volcom, Vans, Nitro, Billabong, Quiksilver, Salomon, Libtech, Anon, Red, Rome, Protec, Electric. Its an impressive list the only downfall is when you pick a sponsor, you dont get that much stuff. Take Burton, you will get like 7 boards, couple jackets and a couple pants, which is nice, but it would have been nice to have a few more things to choose from.
The multiplayer in Stoked looks solid but typical( have not played multiplayer yet). You still do similar challenges to single player only that your going against other people not the AI.
Another big thing in the game is photography, dont know why. If you look at the achievements, a good chunk of them require you to take pictures of yourself, the environment and other people on xbox live.
The weather system which was their biggest advertising point does work. In the trailers it sounds really cool, but when you playing, you do notice it, but you dont really think it, its just there.
Overall Stoked is a solid game, it has a fairly long single player, it has replay value if you want t go back and play it again in the other rider style or try again with different sponsors. A lot of people are asking for DLC's which im sure Destineer and Bongfish are going to look into. It may be hard to find in stores but if you do have a chance to pick it up, I would recommend it.
St0k3d