“Deadly descents” – SSX (2012)

For the story of how SSX was revived to the top of the charts, it’s probably worth looking at other board sports. The Tony Hawk’s skateboarding series had lost its way and was onto the stage of releasing an expensive peripheral-based game which didn’t even make the UK top 40, in a week when The X Factor did. Meanwhile, from 2007 to 2010, EA’s Skate games were a reasonable success, with both sequels making the top 5. Using a new control scheme based on more naturalistic flicks of the analogue sticks, they brought a new feel to spectacular skateboarding. As I mentioned for Fight Night Round 4, EA spread this concept to other games of theirs. Snowboarding seems a particularly obvious read-across, and EA already had a languishing series ready for the treatment.

The 2012 SSX’s controls work similarly. Use the shoulder buttons for grabs of the board, the left stick to control spins and flicks, and the right stick to move in other ways. It makes it feel logical to do different combinations without having to remember the names for them, and a bit easier to vary things up a bit. Resetting back to a neutral position in time for landing comes more easily than trying to game out how long a trick is going to last by other means. I liked Skate and I like this too.

The move towards the natural is combined with many unnatural elements. That means the settings with their winding rails over chasms, but a lot more too. A flow multiplier ticks up as you string combos together, and gives you access to speed boosts, the better to set up big jumps and more spectacular tricks. Do well enough and you get a brief period of special tricks and mega scores, all presented with a stylistic flourish. In a throwback to SSX Tricky, a bit of remixed RUN D.M.C. interrupts whatever was on the soundtrack (generally some FIFA-core light alternative).

That set-up gives SSX an impressive sense of building momentum. Getting into the power-up zone is essential to all of its trick contests and most of its speed ones too. Where it starts to go a bit wrong is that the scoring never feels as precise as the handling. You can do tricks on the flat surface between bigger tricks to keep things going, and it’s not quite clear how much that is required. If you crash straight into a tree you lose your combo, but if you land and go a short way without a trick? Less clear. The result is that SSX never provides the kind of moment of elation of landing a ridiculous combo that Tony Hawk’s used to inspire.

SSX doesn’t have the open world that the Skate series made so much of, but it does bring a couple of updates compared to the PS1 era of snowboarding games. Every score and time you set goes to online leaderboards both general and for your friends (or at least it did once upon a time). You can put geotags in hard-to-get-to places and gain points from picking up other people’s. It’s a fairly standard set of online things by 2012, but it does work well with the format.

Ideas of online competition also pop up in the narrative of its career mode. “Team SSX” are trying to collectively ride a bunch of the world’s most deadly descents, and live streaming them all to raise funding. SSX doesn’t go as far into the mechanics of online popularity as other games soon would, but it’s a very 2010s concern. The comic book intros for each of its characters could easily have come from much earlier, and don’t add too much, although it’s nice both that the first three characters introduced are women and that the game doesn’t feel the need to highlight that.

Get onto the deadly descents themselves and it has a decent set of ways of raising the stakes, from using a wingsuit to traverse big gaps to riding in darkness or extreme cold. They’re a pretty small part of the overall experience, though, more of a proof of concept than a complete draw in themselves. There were no more SSX games to see what might have come next. Perhaps EA could have fleshed out something more narratively compelling. Perhaps going further into a Skate-style open world might have worked out (when Ubisoft later did it with Steep, it was pretty great). Like plenty of other games in 2012, SSX is a game ready to be built on where that building never happened.