SSX On Tour has just as much joy as it does frustration, luckily the experience as a whole is decent at least.
(-) frustrating rubber-band AI opponents are a pain to deal with; some races can last far too long; multiple routes on the hills can mix up a race severely
SSX On Tour is a snowboarding game which has been created to reinvent the series. The game boasts a unique and catchy art style of notebook paper drawn white figures of very elaborate imagination, and this art style spews through the game menus, loading screens, and sprinkled all throughout the game. The game play on its own consists of real-life people snowboarding down a mountain to prove their worth.
The Tour is the one player mode where you create a snowboarder, face, shirt, pants, name, and other attributes, then take on various snowboarding challenges. There are a lot of different ones to work around with, like a head to head race, gathering the collectibles on the track, spending a certain amount of time in air or grinding, and also SSX Tournaments. Even though the core snowboarding principle is always in tact, this does well in mixing the action with variety and does well keeping it from becoming repetitive.
The controls work pretty well for the most part. Accelerating your racer is done with the analog stick, and you can also do tricks in the air using any combination of the game controllers shoulder buttons. This does add some complexity to the game play and could lure it away from a casual audience, but it isn't too much of a problem. Through and through the controllers are quick and responsive and not nearly as unwieldy and clumsy as SSX Blur on the Nintendo Wii.
The graphics are a mixed bag. You have the clever art style of notebook paper drawings to look at throughout the entire game, which is a great concept. The game itself is very fast paced as you snowboard or ski down the hills, and as you pick up much acceleration the screen actually shakes to show an even greater power of your momentum. The frame rate isn't quite as smooth as SSX Blur was, but it isn't a glaring degree so the game is still enjoyable. The environments are complex and fully detailed around every corner, for better or worse because its easier than you think to lose focus and hit something, especially if you consider the wind breaking speeds you move. The character models are less impressive, looking somewhere between realistic and cel-shaded, which doesn't hinder the game much but can be a bother if you view them up close.
The sound is pretty impressive as well. You have dozens and dozens of songs to choose from in your sound track, from rock to hit list category and you can select what you hear during the game. One of my favorite songs was "Red Flag" from Billy Talent, and I now listen to the song regularly thanks to this game introducing it to me. For the most part the music is well acquainted with the action, at almost the same degree as the dreamy numbers you'll hear on SSX Blur. But as your rider takes air in a massive jump, the music kinda wanes down in an effort to create an effect. This made me nauseous after a while, because you can't hear any vocals and the jump from high tempo to low tempo can be disappointing at best.
However the difficulty of the game is pretty uneven throughout thanks to some pesky problematic game mechanics. First of all the AI racers seem to be rubber-banded, which means if you pass them they will receive an automatic boost to help catch up. It can take merely seconds to pass them by a landslide then lose the lead in the same amount of time. It also doesn't help that there are multiple routes through the hill, and it can lead to very quick place changes as well as the rubber band AI, also littered with tons of obstacles that you can run into. And also a bother, are the extremely long length of the races. I've had races that lasted over ten minutes, and most people's attention span doesn't last nearly as long as the race, which can lead to repetitiveness very fast.
SSX On Tour has just as much joy as it does frustration, luckily the experience as a whole is decent at best. A unique and pleasant art style, a great sense of speed, a good amount of variety and a solid soundtrack are enough to make this worth playing. But some of the races last way too long, and the frustrating AI and tricky courses hold it back from being something everyone should check out. But still, it's a solid entry in the SSX series.