I think I'll forego baking a delicious review in the oven and just itemize and deconstruct my thoughts plainly.
What's the game like?
This game is an odd amalgam of racing and tricking, and it doesn't entirely do either well, but exists in an interesting place somewhere between. The sense of speed and momentum of the race in this game is markedly inconsistent, there is a give and take between boosting around corners, and risking expending your downhill velocity to fight gravity for a jump to net you more boost. I feel like EA should have taken cues from Andreas Illiger's 'Tiny Wings' and produced a mechanic that enables building momentum by form of motion across undulating surfaces to help navigate the tumultuous mountainous terrain. The current SSX physics model is largely flat and staid with it's approach to motion through curved space, you tend to lose speed when airborne, and lose speed when going up hill, which can be frustrating.
The AI you race against really only serve as mobile representations of your time objective for that map. You can't hit them, steer them off course, or do anything that physically affects them in any way, which makes me wonder if they are even an AI, and not just target paths generated by the level designers for you to 'beat'. This isn't exactly a terrible thing, it actually fits with the asynchronous multiplayer offerings of the leaderboards and friendslist ghosts, but it makes the 'solo' campaign feel vapid and largely a tutorial.
EA has overplayed, even misrepresented, how many 'drops' and courses the game has, mostly by being effusive about the nature of the content. There are indeed as many 'drops' as they list on the game cover (somewhere over 100), but the large majority of the courses share the same content, or don't provide the same level of detail and engineering as a traditional campaign course, but rather feel like the lackluster 'survival' challenges found in the solo campaign, which aren't especially enjoyable.
The game does have exceptionally well designed levels that are open to varying degrees, some take more time to learn and appreciate than others. Patagonia, the Himalayas, the Alps, The Rockies, Alaska, Africa, Russia, Antarctica and New Zealand each have 3 or 4 peaks, but each region really only has one good peak, the one featured in the campaign races. Each peak will have a few different drops, but they meet each other at some place near the mid point or base. I initially disliked the Antarctica region maps, but later learned to love them once I'd 'leveled' up my character and gotten a wingsuit.
I think the gear, level and experience systems do little to add to the game other than 'gameify' what feels like control fidelity, which in my opinion, is a cardinal sin of design.
Also, the soundtrack largely sucks. I like the Big Pink, I like the Handsome Furs and I like a few other select songs. None of the songs I like belong in this game though. And the songs that do fit just don't pop the way they should, or are dubstep, which is the worst thing to happen to our generation.
The tricks system is easy enough to exploit, and grinding on rails is easier than it has ever been in the series, which might not be saying much. Your character largely auto-aligns to terrain, which has caused him/her to flip direction and boost back up the mountain during a race event, which is far worse than merely loosing momentum. The rewind mechanic is useless, as has been extolled by the internet for sometime now, but bears repeating. This game is unforgiving, and missing a jump, whiffing a landing, or not getting the right rail is frequently cause to reset the match.
With all this said, I've been foolishly throwing myself at the Explore mode and have gotten gold on all of the significant courses I have played, with a few exceptions. It's addictive, enough that I think I may be developing something bad in my left hand because of the strain I put on it to get gold. I also notice that I frequently forget to blink for extended periods of time. Usually crossing finish is a painful experience, because it means I'm closing my eyes and feeling the intense burn and welling of tears in my eyes because I forgot to close them for 1:55 seconds.
Soon, I'll only associate succeeding at SSX with pain, which seems par for the course.