Music Reviews of Videogames, PS2, XBox, Gamecube

Music Reviews of Videogames, PS2, XBox, Gamecube, Dreamcast

Aggressive Inline — PS2 Buy it at Amazon

Buy it from InSound

The first thing that I would like to point out before starting this little review is that before I played this game, I had not played much of the Tony Hawk series. I had played Tony Hawks 2 & 3 a little, but didn't even really like what I had played. Now that I have said that, Aggressive Inline is probably one of the top ten games that I have ever played. It is THAT good.

Aggressive Inline is a "Tony Hawk" style extreme sports game, based on inline skating. I know!!! I know!! Inline Skating?? Yeah....reeeaal extreme!!! All I have to say is, check out the videos in this game of the pros and your views might change. They do all of the cool tricks that you would expect from any suicidal skater trying to see how many bones they can break.

Ok. To the game. The first thing that I noticed when I started playing this game, are the environments. The first level (of seven) is the Movie Lot. You are skating around grinding benches, walls, etc, on the streets of a movie studio. All the while thinking, wow, this level is as big as any of the Tony Hawk 3 levels. Then you stumble upon a huge door that opens and now you are on a movie set. This part of the level is as big as the last part. The levels are absolutely massive!! I'm talking two sometimes three times the size of some of the levels in any other extreme sports game of this type. There is so much to do in each level that you can spend so much time in one area and you never get bored. Each level is completely different. You have a Movie Lot, a Civic Center, an Amusement Park, an Airfield, and a few others. All having perfect lines to skate so you can string up really huge trick combos.
That brings me to the meat of the game, the career mode. Just like in Tony Hawk, there are challenges that have to be completed in order to open up the other levels. You get them by going to the pause menu and checking the challenge list for that level. You also get them by talking to different people scattered throughout the levels. Also, some of the challenges will trigger events that alter the environment. For example, in the Movie Lot, you do one for a ghost's voice coming from a tombstone under a giant tree. When you complete the challenge, it causes the tree to grow and extend it's limbs up to a cliff part of the set that you couldn't get to before; which gives you another area to skate in. There are dozens of times throughout the game that this happens.
Another improvement over the Tony Hawk games (in my opinion) is lack of the 2-minute timer for challenges. Instead you have a meter that goes up the more tricks you pull and goes down when you wreck. This let’s you have an unlimited amount of time to explore, and do the goals. As long as you are doing tricks to keep the meter up. With the amount of challenges that there are in each level (at least 15 or more) this lack of time limit is almost necessary.
The controls will be easy for anyone who has played Tony Hawk to pick up and play. The only addition is the use of the action button. This lets you do a variety of different things depending on certain objects that you are next to. It lets you grab the back of moving vehicles (roller coasters included!). It lets you swing around vertical and horizontal poles. It lets you vault over benches and other items. This really adds a lot to the style of the game. The graphics in Aggressive Inline are very good. The detail in each level is outstanding. Each level is colorful and animated with running traffic, roller coasters, planes flying overhead, etc. The character models are not as detailed as the ones in Tony Hawk 3, but do the job fine.
If the developers had added a create-a-skater mode to the game, (it does have a level editor) then the game would be "perfect". Instead its just "almost perfect"

- Wayne

Technorati tags: Aggressive Inline, PS2, Videogame Review, videogames, review

comments (0) | Permalink