I have owned the game for about 5 days now. I have spent a good amount of time with it, doing a lot of global events, moving through the single player, doing some exploration stuff. My thoughts are definitely not completely thorough but I feel I have played enough to form a pretty thought out opinion of the game.

When SSX is about Trick It events on slopes with huge air, logical track progression, and no pits of death, SSX is pretty damn good. The trick system isn't the best in the series by a wide margin but it easy to understand and makes doing crazy things very simple. I find the face that boost is on right trigger a bit annoying however since I'm always holding that and end up doing a lot of the same tweaks since I'm already pressing it into a jump. Going from jump to jump doing huge tricks is still fun and love being able to pull off a full combo and seeing the score sky rocket.

That's the main problem with SSX... it's not all about doing tricks. Now even saying that - when it is about doing tricks sometimes it stumbles as well. So many of these tracks are completely illogical in their design and it seems that they are setup to frustrate rather than push you towards huge air. So many of the tracks on the bigger slopes involve jumps or ramps that lead to nowhere or straight into pits of death. This is ridiculous. The game is setup in a way so you can "trick off of any terrain" yet when you try to do this you're blocked so often. The latter slopes are so non-trick focused they are worthless to play IMO. When they try to shoe-horn trick it into them it's neither fun or enjoyable.

I think part of what makes this so much of an issue is how the physics and player movement is setup. There's a weird simulation going on in SSX to replicate how a snow-boarder goes down a slope. Obviously it's not realistic necessarily but what it does is create so many situation where you are trying to do a trick off a ramp and end up veering off to the side and sliding off of it. This is mainly due to the fact that winding up your jumps pulls your character in the direction you're winding. I really can't understand the reason for this - it completely defeats the purpose of winding up jumps. The game literally tells you "the longer you wind up a jump the fast you will spin" -- when you attempt this you realize that you've completely went off your mark and missed the jump. Duhhhhh??? On top of this, the game is so fast going down the slopes that any course correction is near impossible.

So you've fucked up a jump. No big deal right? They included a re-wind into the game. But here's the rub: rewind negates your combo! Not only does it negate it but it literally puts you in the negative! So you've basically just boned yourself and there's no reason to proceed. Restarting is the only logical option. Now what is the purpose of rewind again?

Going back to what I started talking about: Trick It is fun. A lot of fun. As long as you are on the few slopes that actually cater to it properly, you're going to have a good time. The rest of the game ranges of middling to flat out not fun. Races are the former - Deadly Descent the latter. Especially wingsuit which is god-awful 90% of the time.

I'm pretty down on SSX most of the time. Sessions typically end with me rage quitting because I've gotten tired of restarting the same events over and over because my character decided to land a half an inch to the left and veered over into a wall and basically did a loop-de-loop, killing my combo and ruining any chance of ranking....

First dud of 2012.

Sad that you wasted your money :( 
 
For me, SSX has always been at it's core about trade-offs and gambles with trajectory and a little resource management. The speed and winding ahead of a jump means that you have to dedicate to a line... which means learning a track and knowing that "on this jump I need to angle slightly right" or something to not end up bailed out. 
 
In SSX 3 you had to do this for the big pick-ups if you wanted score or more boost... this one the benefit is the same essentially due to the complexity of the course - you land a big one and reap the benefits, or you don't and bail. 
 
So - protip: wind for a flip if you really like your line... they are worth more anyway. Wind for a spin if you are adjusting your angle... or just do both and get crazy. 
 
IMO it would be way worse if you didn't move left or right at all when you were winding. So often you need to wind right when you land before you can jump again... which would complicate the trajectory problem a few jumps back up the hill... which doesn't sound like fun.

Gotta say I find the "trap"jumps pretty annoying too. Been banging my head against the 2 mill drop event the last few days, and the beginning of that drop is just trap after trap. Eventually I just learned to deliberately not jump where the game told me there are jumps. Having that said though I've been enjoying the game quite a lot, but as you say it's really only the trick events that are worthwhile. Fortunately though even if you ignore two of the three modes in the game, and several of the tracks that are obviously designed for those modes, there's still plenty of stuff to do :P

The controls are a little odd in some areas if you don't switch to classic. I've been using the new standard and buttons for a while now that switching to Classic wouldn't make much sense now. I was also a little confused at first when my wind-ups would steer my rider left or right as I distinctly remembered being able to lock in when you wind-up. The only way to alleviate the issue for me now is to either switch to classic or just never do spin tricks unless they're quick flatground hops.

Which brings me to my second issue - I've decided on the former most out of necessity. If you want to beat high scores and stay on top of the leaderboards you will have to veer away from a "fun" Trick It session to a completely obsessive bunny hopping extravaganza. In order to squeeze out as many points as humanly possibly you WILL have to do only flips, do them constantly between every large jump, limit yourself to only a few tricks to maximize points. This is no ones fault but honestly some runs turn into complete tedium when you - start to finish - do single or double flips all the time, on big jumps limit yourself to the two or three highest scoring tricks (your signature not being one of them) and instead of going down with velocity and momentum, be constantly bumping and grinding side walls when possible to get a few more flips off before you reach the bottom. Now this is no ones fault - it's simply competition and I have no clue how it could be fixed. They already put a few systems in like not being able to go in reverse or losing your multiplier if you go too slow. If you weren't tricking against ghosts maybe it would be less of an issue as people would have to give each other space? As it is I'm really enjoying the game and the few of you cool "doods" I've added to compete against always give me a good workout to earn the occassional gold or silver. The problem is that if I don't tell myself to ease off and just try to have a "fun" run with a high score instead of an OCD flip fest I can see fatigue setting in pretty quick.

I wouldn't call it a dud. I have spent a lot of time with it and I will cop to the fact that when I take a step back the formula can be very boiled down. That being said, I've still had SO much with the courses and the different events. Really enjoy it and I think I will be playing it for a LONG time to come. I'm sorry you felt like you wasted your money though.

Bottomless pits do suck though...

I'll go a step further than just saying that bottomless pits suck...Deadly Descents suck. All but the Rockies are an exercise to test your patients. Sense when is obscured vision and bottomless pits fun?

Thankfully the frustrating drops are kept to a minimum. Out of the 160 or so drops I stay away from about 30. There is more than enough content that I like to keep my busy for a while.

Trick It is boring, but Racing and Survive It is pretty awesome.

@Fistfulofmetal: I totally disagree with a lot of these points. I think it's the best game of 2012 so far. It handles super well, though it's tough to the point where it really takes some effort to get a good run. In fact the difficulty is what I love about it, and the leaderboards gives you a reason to keep trying.@Humanity: I think it's fair enough that there's no room for error in going for the leaderboards - that's what competition is all about. Some guy somewhere is going to be willing to learn a track so that he doesn't make a mistake. So I guess he deserves first place.

I love the fact they run trick and race events on survive drops. It makes it so interesting. Gonna be playing this game for ages.

The only issue I have so far is that for some crazy reason, it doesn't play copy-protected itunes music in a custom playlist (even though they're playable by the PS3) which seems a bit dumb to be honest. I'm trying to search around for an AAC to MP3 converter.

World Tour is hard.

Best game of 2012 as of now.

I remember seeing a comment somewhere that resonated with me relating to my frustration with the game. One of the main problems I have with this game is the track variety and layout like others have said, however, this comes from the fact that each and every drop has a trick and race event. Meaning, the track has to be designed to be a good track for both kinds of gameplay unlike past SSX games which featured plenty of separate trick tracks and race tracks that were designed specifically for those types of gameplay. If any DLC is released for this game I would hope that they would introduce a mountain range or two that had very tightly focused tracks for each type of gameplay, I'm just not convinced that you can have a track that can be both.

I really like survival.

I was never a fan of Trick events in SSX, and while I'm still not I can tolerate them now.

I think some ranges like the Alps are great, most are okay and Africa is awful.

Why is everyone complaining about the descents being hard, I eventually found them so easy that I ended up taking off the survival gear on my first run to make it difficult, I am missing something?

I'm finding the exact same problems with the track design for trick events, in addition to all the extra "survival" stuff they force you to use while doing them. Really disappointed with it so will be trading it in on Friday against ME3 unfortunately.

I really enjoy the online leaderboards and global events. However, the actual "single player" is very hit or miss. I really am not a fan of the survival events and bottomless pits as others have said.

Just give me a clear shot down the mountain and let me do as many tricks as I can. That's what I've been enjoying.

I just started playing the game today, and it was a pretty miserable experience. So far it feels like somebody put together something that looks like it has all the pieces of an SSX game, but forgot to check that it was actually fun to play.

The difficulty curve is really weird, too. Some events are comically easy, while earlier events on the same peak go out of their way to lay the boot in for no good reason.

@Zalathar said:

I just started playing the game today, and it was a pretty miserable experience. So far it feels like somebody put together something that looks like it has all the pieces of an SSX game, but forgot to check that it was actually fun to play.

The difficulty curve is really weird, too. Some events are comically easy, while earlier events on the same peak go out of their way to lay the boot in for no good reason.

Difficulty curve aside, this game is really fun. Certain courses are fucking awful, and should only be played on survive it. But there are quite a lot of really fun drops for trick it and race it that I enjoy a lot and I haven't even played a whole lot of the game yet.

Is there any reason to persist with the World Tour mode, or should I skip it entirely and start looking for courses I actually like?

While I tend to rage for a few seconds every time I plunge into a bottomless pit, I'm actually really warming to the Survival runs. Especially on the multiplayer side of things. I know that I'm not as good at trick runs as the people in the diamond tier runs, but I love to do the survival runs. Once you get to the bottom it sends you back to the top for another run. When your armor finally gives way, your totally distance travelled is your final score. Really enjoying it!

I didn't play any previous SSX games but always played a lot of 1080 (not so much the Gamecube one...) and Cool Boarders back on the Playstation. I've found myself enjoying the new SSX a lot.

I agree with everything you say OP. The level design for some levels is just frustrating, which is intentional it seems like. The game is about flow, and sweet ass tricks, but random ass crevices and trees that stop a combo are annoying. The rewind is a pointless tool and negates combo, and restarting is better. You end up going up a slope with awkward jumps somtimes instead of going down, and going up a ramp the wrong one leads to you flying upside down, and is annoying.

Apart from that i love the game, the ridernet is amazing, but i dunno, i enjoy it, but i doubt ill stick with it, we will see.

To me, the tricks just don't seem to have that much variety. Particularly when you're trying to rack up enough points to place on some of the popular world events. If you're doing it right, you're in "tricky" for most of the time while boosting (holding down RT) which means you only see the tweaked, "tricky" moves. Gets a bit boring to me

This feels like a year long game to me, providing the community sticks with it. I love logging in every day and having some new event to try or another score or time to beat.

It's awesome but bottomless pits can fuck right off.

One thing really bothering me about the basic gameplay coming from SSX3 and draining my enjoyment with this new one is how easy it is to spin and flip from the start. In SSX3 if you wound up / prepped for a jump at all, you were pretty much locked into that rotation. It was grounded somewhat in reality because of that. In the new SSX, you can change rotation in mid-air incredibly fast and even do front flip to back flip to front flip, etc. In SSX3, if you tried to change your rotation all you'd do is slow down or stall your current one, which actually made for some pretty neat looking tricks, the only time you had some notion of air control is if you didn't wind up at all. In the new game you can still do a 1080+ off a tiny jump even if you don't wind up. Add to that how easy it is to land anything now, loose turning that no longer feels like deliberate carving, lack of rail balancing, bottomless pits, short course design, etc and my interest in the future of this series is zero.

I don't know why the super air control bothers me so much, but it's up there with all the bottomless pits. I feel like should have to get big air to do a big trick and momentum should matter, but in this game you can basically still do a big enough trick to up your multiplier on flat land. I wonder if the air control is just because of the helicopters you can trick off of, they do reset your rotation when you hit them.

@ThisJesusfreak said:

To me, the tricks just don't seem to have that much variety. Particularly when you're trying to rack up enough points to place on some of the popular world events. If you're doing it right, you're in "tricky" for most of the time while boosting (holding down RT) which means you only see the tweaked, "tricky" moves. Gets a bit boring to me

You don't have to hold down RT to tweak the tricks in the air..

The main problem with this game is that on the cover of the box it says SSX, and it's not SSX. I know games need to evolve and change but this just the trick system from the SSX series bolted onto something so different that it might as well just be a different game. There's no outlandish locals like in the early SSX games. There's no Giant mountain like SSX3. There's a TON of content in the game that a lot of people actively dislike.

What makes matters worse is that the part of the game that I thought would be the fun part, the score chasing, just makes the game more frustrating. The bunny hop part of the game is plain stupid. It's basically gaming the system to the point that it doesn't resemble what the game seems to want you to do. The time between new combos screws you over if you want a massive score as you can't cost off to the next good jump, you have to do a bunch of sub tricks or goof with the shitty ground tricks to keep your combo going. Rewind at first seemed to be a good idea until you realize that is drains your score making the thing useless.

The main reason this isn't an SSX game is that in it's essence, SSX was about goofing off and getting a good enough score to get the medals and move on. Now your score is up against everyone online and unless your really really good that makes the game worthless to play. The only reason to keep playing is to keep score chasing and if your just not going to be one of the ones that can drive the narrow road to victory your games always going to tell you how much you suck every time you log in. I knew in the old games I wasn't the best SSX player in teh world, but at leas I was good enough that I was always having fun, and now I'm just irritated I have to restart teh same run 15 times before I eventually just pull the disc out and play something that's just always fun and not trying my patience.

My issues consist of my friend ABUSING the wingsuit.

I don't like that the tricks and races all seem to be lumped together on all courses.. i'd have been fine with some. But the trick events should have felt a little more independent.

No real time multiplayer sucks as well.

Love the deadly descents though.

I still think SSX Tricky is the best in the series, but this new one isn't too bad......not as good as I expected though.

Played the demo a bunch so was stoked to get it from the libeary today. I've played maybe an hour and I think I'm done. Bland, boring game, man. Now I can understand why nobody on the bombcast has played more than a couple of hours of it and why even Sean Coonce is done with it.