Reviewed: January 18, 2006
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
2K Sports

Developer
Indie Built

Released: November 22, 2005
Genre: Sports
Players: 1
ESRB: Teen

9
9
10
9
9.1

Supported Features:

Amped 3 is the latest installment in this snowboarding series and is exclusive to the Xbox 360. I have to admit, I had my doubts. From what I saw in all the pre-release materials, this game just failed to grab me, but after a few hours of playing the final release I was a goner…hooked for life in what is one of the funniest, challenging, and most addicting game in the Xbox 360 library.

Words can’t even begin to describe the creativity in the cutscenes created for Amped 3. If you thought the animated sketches in the last SSX On Tour were cool then you will love this. There are very few traditional movies using game graphics. Instead, you are treated to cutscenes that are based on a theme specific to each chapter of the game.

You start off with a female narrator paging through her stalker scrapbook and then you are treated to the first of several retro game screens that introduce the next level. Each chapter has a theme like paging through an animated sketchbook to learn various tricks and techniques, or taking a trip to Wienerland as told by a TV commercial style spokesman selling the latest toy.

You then move onto some hilarious anime-style cutscenes followed by hand puppets recreating a Russian game show called Ski Patrol, or sock puppets recreating a Yeti attack in Utah, and don’t even get me started on the pig who kick starts our career in advertising. As hysterical as all these movies are, they actually do tie in the various game challenges that progress your career.

The world of Amped 3 is totally free. Each time you come back to the game and reload your boarder you can jump to any available mountain and rotate that mountain to access any unlocked slope. On each slope are dozens of color-coded events that will test all your skills. There are photo-op challenges, two-player challenges where you and another player are bungied together on sleds and must crash down the mountain trying to sustain the most damage, and dozens of others.

There are ring challenges that require you to pass through sequential rings while performing tricks to amass the require points, or you might have to collect kitty litter, or even take revealing snapshots with your camera. Each challenge is prefaced with a twisted splash screen and hilarious music.

To add to the realism, each side of the mountain only has a few insertion points, so once you pick the challenge you want to do you then must pick the ski lift. The closest lift is always highlighted and you can then ski to the target circle that will then start that challenge. You don’t even have to pick a challenge from the Trail menu. You can simply pick the highest drop zone and freestyle down the mountain picking off various challenges as you encounter them. It’s totally open-ended gameplay and you are never forced into a story or doing anything other than having fun.

Control is very fluid in Amped 3 and the analog input is used to control your boarder on the snow and in the air. You can even tweak your air-tricks by just barely pushing the stick to engage a slow-motion style multiplier. Grinding, jumping, carving, and doing all the standard tricks is just as intuitive as ever and quickly becomes second nature leaving you to only worry about connecting all those tricks into massive combos.

Grinds and butters require a bit of balance and a meter will pop-up indicating which direction you need to counter the forces of gravity to keep the trick sustained. There is no longer an actual button you must press to invoke a rail trick so it’s almost too easy to attach to a rail, but it’s still challenging to do tricks on those rails and even trickier to combo from rail to rail.

Some of the most fun you can have in Amped 3 is off the snowboard. You can ride a snowmobile and use it to complete several challenges. You can also ride down the mountain in a recliner, a bathtub, inner tube, and those small plastic discs.

Three words – “sled trauma challenge”. Call in sick, send the kids to your mom’s, put a seat cover on the couch – you aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. This is the single most addictive gameplay mode since Burnout created the crash challenge. Get a group together and start passing the controller around and two or three hours will just slip by.

Of course the biggest addiction will be the desire to earn the high score, the gold medal, and a ranking on the Xbox Live leaderboard. Every aspect of the game design encourages you to replay each challenge until you have mastered it. You are only ranked on Xbox Live once you have earned a gold medal. Until then your medal status and score is shown with a small bar graph in the corner of the screen. Most challenges are fairly short and easily restarted.

The only other aspect of Amped 3 really worth covering is Awesomeness. As you bust off a sequence of mad tricks your awesomeness meter will slowly fill. Once its filled the crowds on the slopes will be ready to watch you perform more stunts. These people are indicated by an eyeball icon over their heads. Simply do more tricks in their presence to get them “stoked”, and stoke the required amount of people per mountain for special bonuses.

The first thing that will grab your attention is the trail map, an overhead view of each slope of each mountain. This is not a map but an actual camera view of the entire mountain slope. You can zoom out to a satellite view or zoom in to see smaller details and plan your trick lines on logs and rails.

The character creation is excellent and gives you great freedom in creating a totally original character and then decking them out in a bunch of licensed apparel. You’ll be able to unlock more gear and clothing as the story progresses and even some secret outfits like the pink bunny suit and the abominable snowman.

The draw distance is off the charts, or at least to the horizon. There is some moderate pop-up on a few of the slopes but a lot of this is hidden behind steep drop-offs and most of the details will have loaded before you reach the next blind crest.

The boarder animation is excellent and matches the fluid movements of the stick you are using to control them. Everything is so graceful and natural you become one with the boarder. It’s almost cathartic to just pick the highest drop zone and freestyle to the bottom. Of course some of the funniest animation is also the most painful to watch as your boarder will plummet over a cliff and tumble from rock to rock and roll down the snowy surface racking up huge damage points.

I’ve already mentioned the cutscenes, but they deserve some more kudos in this section. These movies are so unique and original that I would suspect each theme had their own design team. And while many might think that Indie Built was copping out on making CG movies, I have to say, the movies in this game show far more initiative and creativity than anything I have seen in the past three years.

A big “thank you” to Indie Built for taking the road less traveled and not going for the easy pop-licensed soundtrack. You’ve exposed me to some truly great music I would have otherwise never have heard, and hopefully a few indie bands will get their 15 minutes of fame, if not more.

The sound effects are minimal and include your board sliding on snow, wood, and stone, or the rumble of a snowmobile engine. There just isn’t that much else on the mountain to create sound.

The speech and dialogue is simply awesome and matches the creative script of both the story progression and the wacky movies. Each of the characters in your circle of friends has their own distinct personality so you can easily recognize who is talking just by their voice. Of course the most memorable sound in the game will be the sustained cries of despair and howls of pain as you tumble down the mountain during the sled trauma challenges.

There are 1000 Achievement points broken down into logical rewards for finishing chapters in the story, stoking enough spectators, earning medals, and even building custom ski parks. And with the totally open nature of the gameplay and the sheer joy of skiing down the mountain for the sake of skiing, this is one game you’ll probably be playing a year from now.

But with so much content, miles of mountainside, hours of music, addictive mini-games, hilarious movies, park editor, online leaderboards, sleds, snowmobiles and even bathtubs, Amped 3 is in a class all its own.