Amped 2 Review

‘Amped’ was one of the first titles that made up a relatively successful launch for the Xbox, two years later a sequel arrives to bolster the Xbox Live! catalogue. Following on from the recently released ‘SSX3’, ‘Amped 2’ takes a slightly different approach favouring realistic moves and a less forgiving control scheme.<br><br>The game features five different modes for players to take part in, namely ‘Free Ride’, ‘Career’, ‘Just Ride’, ‘Session’ and ‘XSN Sports’. Whilst the main bulk of the single-player game is focussed on the ‘Career’ mode, the other options are geared towards multiplayer via system-link or Xbox Live!.<br><br>The ‘Career’ mode is similar to the previous outing and challenges players to become the best by undertaking a variety of different challenges. Successfully completing these grants you skill points and board points to enhance your characters attributes and buy new items for him/her.<br><br>The challenges on offer are mainly based on those from the original, challenging players to pull off special tricks for the photographers to catch, impressing sponsors to a range of score based challenges.<br><br>Although the developers have been working hard to implement the impressive Xbox Live! aspects, they’ve also had time to implement a new trick, score and control system. Firstly the game introduces the all-new ‘Butter’ system, which is essentially the same as the manual technique in the ‘Tony Hawk Pro Skater’ series; simply by tapping on the left analogue stick you can now link tricks together to score bigger points. <br><br>Along with controlling the butter manoeuvres, the left analogue stick controls your boarder and also the flip and twist tricks, whilst the right analogue stick allows you to perform a variety of grab and flip moves by pressing in different directions. It’s quite a complicated system that takes awhile to get the hang of, however a helpful yet annoying tutorial has been included to get everybody up to scratch.<br><br>To complicate matters even further, ‘Amped 2’ introduces a style concept. Here it’s possible to gain further points by performing stylish tricks, to do so you must ensure all of your flips and twists are carried out with smooth, steady motions of the analogue stick instead of twitchy, erratic movements. This is certainly a concept that is hard to master and can be particularly frustrating, mainly because it’s so sensitive and extreme sports games have never really been focussed on exact precision when pulling off tricks. We can certainly see the intention of placing emphasis on finesse, but unfortunately the control system just isn’t quite up to scratch and ultimately leaves you forgetting about style moves in the main.<br><br>Unfortunately the overall game still feels slightly wrong; landings are as unforgiving as ever which gives little scope for trying out the harder tricks, whilst the overall feeling is still a little too floaty for our liking.<br><br>However taking this online via Xbox Live! is where the game truly shines. ‘Amped 2’ supports the XSN Sports network, allowing players to create a pack with your friends and compete on challenges together, whilst you’re also free to set up your own competitions and compete in special tournaments designed by Microsoft.<br>Away from the XSN aspects, Xbox Live! allows players to free-ride across the mountain with other gamers in the ‘Just Ride’ mode or challenge other gamers in a variety of challenges in the ‘Session’ mode.<br><br>Although the original ‘Amped’ was used to showcase the Xbox graphical power (complete with Photoshop after effects), it’s fair to say that we expect a better level of quality from Xbox games these days. To be fair ‘Amped 2’ does look beautiful at certain points, it features an impressive draw-distance that allows you to see all the way down the mountain, whilst there’s a nice display of ambient lighting effects to set the tone. However we were disappointed by the stiff animations and some rather crude texture work on background objects.<br><br>Continuing the trend set out in the original, ‘Amped 2’ includes hundreds of unknown songs for you to listen to whilst flying down the mountain. The variety of the songs spans across virtually every music genre in existence, with some you’ll love and some you’ll hate. The game also includes the option to rip your own songs to the Xbox HDD and play them in the game, a nice touch for those that can’t find anything they like in the hundreds of tracks available.