With skateboarding titles in the past, the key idea has always been about pulling off a large combination of fancy tricks and techniques to rack up as high a score as possible. The Tony Hawk series added obscure side missions and quests that you had to complete while riding on your skateboard. However, over the years the genre has become a bit stagnant. And this where Shaun White Skateboarding comes in to try something different.
Taken out of Shaun White Snowboarding: World Tour for the Wii, the game features an unusual plot where a dictator has taken over a town and has taken away all its fun, colour and life. This has turned the town into a black, gray and white concrete jungle. It’s up to the player to restore the fun and colour by skateboarding.
Colour us interested.
The game seems to be a real transformation for the series, as it revolves the unique mechanics of ‘inference’ and ‘shaping’. The idea behind ‘inference’ is that as you skate, you can create inference by jumping up and upon landing, you release a shockwave of colours which brings life and vibrance back to the environments.
Once you are done colouring with ‘inference’, the next step is ‘shaping’. As the colour returns to the environment, players you will come across on screen prompts, in the form of arrows, that will allow for the ‘shaping’. This will cause transformations in the environment, which means that you will literally ‘shape’ the environment. This will allow players to create things like rails and ramps in the most unlikely and improbably of locations... such as mid-air.
It should be clear by now that this game isn’t your ordinary skateboard video game. Sure, the usual skateboard moves and trick systems are present to allow players to pull off some fancy maneuvers. So, expect plenty of risky high flying maneuvers and rail grinding. The new colouring and transforming systems really add a degree of ‘arcade-ness’ to it. It’s nice to see some new ideas being implemented into the tried and tested genre, and hopefully they will work as well as they sound.
Anything Tony can do, Shaun can do too.
So far, the game does look fun. It certainly has a unique artistic flair and styling. The idea of colouring a town should remind gamers of de Blob and the game overall looks rather amusing and comical. The real time transformations and shaping system look really impressive in action, blending nicely with the fast flow and pace of the gameplay, with with no visual hitches to speak of.
Shaun White Skateboarding looks to be a unique skateboarding title, and seems to be a mix of skateboarding simulation as well as arcade style fun. The genre has grown a tad bit stale recently and hopefully, Shaun White Skateboarding will execute its fresh new ideas well. Even if they do seem rather odd.
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