Shaun White Snowboarding
Shaun White Snowboarding is a snowboarding game featuring, and endorsed by, Shaun White. The title is pretty accurate. I have never been snowboarding in real life, so from a complete gamer perspective, the game honestly isn't that great.
Gameplay
In Shaun White Snowboarding, you snowboard. At the beginning of the game, Shaun White kindly asks you to go fetch 12 Euros. The game begins with a fetch quest; never, ever a good sign. This was just foreshadowing of the horrible, horrible game to follow. You go get the 12 Euros, go back to Shaun, and he asks you to go fetch 12 Yen. After you get those, he asks you to go get 12 Dollars. Needless to say, I got fed up at this point.
Normally, fetch quests by themselves are fairly annoying, but enjoyable. The storyline of this game is fetch quests. The annoying part is the various coins are in THE MOST annoying of locations. With each new currency you are forced to collect, Shaun introduces a new “Focus” power. These include crushing barriers / messing up other players, speed boost, and massive jumps. The new focus power must be used to collect the new currency. The problem is, all of these powers are impossible to control effectively. Aside from the fetch quests, the game has some various races, trick contests, and the like. None of them are relevant to the main quest, making them rather boring.
Speaking of controls, the game has serious control issues. Jumping is done with the Right Trigger, body control with the left, board with the right. Focus powers are controlled with the face buttons. That being said, the controls are very difficult to use to pull off decent tricks. I spent the majority of the game doing basic flips and spins, and very few grabs. Basically, the trick system is mashing and holding buttons, and holding triggers. If you're lucky, you'll land it.
On top of all these other problems, the game has serious technical issues. I fell through the ground at one point, and actually got an achievement (not for falling through the ground, but rather for doing a bunch of tricks in one jump). The very little time I spent online, I managed to incapacitate a fellow player with snowballs for about 20 minutes. This is possibly the worst flaw I have ever seen in a game. It is essentially a built-in griefing engine.
Sound
The soundtrack is certainly nothing to write home about. The soundtrack consists of generic indie/emo songs, recycled music game songs, and a few other unnoteworthy songs. The soundtrack features quite a few songs from such rhythm games such as “Barracuda” and a few others. In fact, the soundtrack was so boring and mundane, I usually just turned off the sound and listened to my own music.
The sound effects, as well as the voice acting are nothing special, and nothing worth writing home about.
Graphics
The graphics, again, are nothing special. The graphics have a few glitches, such as the snow not behaving as expected, the game “painting” textures over textures that make no sense in real life, and various clipping issues. The players' board constantly clips through the snow, popping in and out to the point it just becomes distracting and annoying. Shuan White's character model also looks like a monster, with hair that doesn't move, so it is constantly stuck in a weird box-like shape.
Replayability
The fetch quests got so annoying, so mundane, and so difficult that I eventually gave up on the final few. What little of the online I played seemed to feature very few new or unique game modes compared to the single player.
Value
For $60, without meaningful multiplayer, decent single player, or enticing gameplay, there are several other games this season that are better worth your money.
Shaun White Snowboarding, overall, is literally the worst snowboarding game I have ever played. With other snowboarding games like the SSX series, and even on the 360 Amped 3, SWS is not a game anyone in their right mind should ever purchase.