Got the full game yesterday thanks to GAME group giving me ?39 trade in for syndicate ( 
)
So you'll of got the jist of it if you have played the demo, but here are a breakdown of the main game modes.
World tour basically one large protracted tutorial that takes you round every mountain in the game, you often don't have to come 1st to proceed to the next track, in fact if you fail too many times you are able to skip and move on.
DJ Atomika from Burnout Paradise makes a return to talk you through the menus and the "story" which is something to do with some guy being more famous than team SSX or something.
Every so often you even get "treated" to an ugly motion comic that flies past so fast you can't keep up (Anybody else spot the Spartans?)
Here you get introduced to the main types of play
Race it
Trick it
Survive it
Race it and trick it see you racing and tricking against some very forgiving AI, the 3rd one is a little more varied, the survive it maps usually make use of some different (often awful) mechanics.
There will be maps with giant giant jumps on them so you need the wingsuit to get around.
Other survive it courses are bastards strewn with trees and rocks, you have to equip armor which protects you fleshy body from damage; lose you armour and your health and you die. When you restart you get a little X on the map to see how far you made it last time, ala doodle jump.
Other survive modes make use of
headlamps (pitch black through tunnels)
Solar panels (go into unlit areas too long and freeze to death)
oxygen tanks (you have to top up your air with RB to stop yourself from blacking out at high altitude )
Ice picks (twisty turny ice levels where your picks help you to steer yourself away from sheer drops)
There are also avalanche escapes where the camera zooms right out and you are coming towards it, which an avalanche behind you. Reversed controls. ****
Feels like you are controlling a little RC snowboarder.
Quite varied, but can't say I'm a fan of any of the GEAR other than the wingsuit.
Throughout global tour you can level up any of the 10 or so characters to give them better abilities as well as purchase higher level equipment which may make them better at tricks or boosting or give them more armour etc.
World tour feels like just one big tutorial and I'm looking forward to completing it.
So that is the kind annoying mode out of the way, and the mode I suspect the edge review was almost entirely based upon the meat and potatoes of the game are the remaining two modes
Explore
This is the game mode seen in the demo, time and trick attack modes where the aim is to get GOLD on every single course.
Here you can also see your friends/rivals ghosts and compete against them to earn some extra money and XP to use making your character faster, boostier and trickier.
Survive it also features in here, requiring your to hurtle through dangerous conditions as fast as you can without dying.
A big part of the enjoyment here is the competitive aspect replaying maps your friends have played and trying to beat their times. If you beat their time you actually get some extra cash and if you fail to beat it, when they next turn on their console they will be given some extra cash too.
You'll of seen a far more basic version of this in Need for Speed and Burnout Crash.
Global Events
This is about as close to Multiplayer as the game offers you may of heard , there is no traditional multiplayer, both online or offline.
You can enter a global event for free, or sometimes you have to pay your in game money to enter.
You can see the number of players trying the same challenge and you can see the prize pool (which will often be into the billions)
The events are time, so you can enter at any time during the time it is available, which may be from just 30 minutes to a whole week, you play the track and get the best score you can.
At the end of the course you will be graded into Diamond , platinum , gold, silver or bronze. Depending on the relative scores of the other players who have entered. So to get diamond you have to have a score in the top 10% of all the players.
Money in the prize pool is allocated to everyone depending on which category they fell into. When the event has finished, you will be awarded cash depending on your standing within the event.
As more people beat other peoples scores (or don't I suppose) your ranking can drop, the game will send you a notification if this happens.
The good thing about this is, you can enter any global event as many times as you like to push your score higher and higher and get into the other escalons of players, thus hopefully securing yourself more money when it is over. You will also be earning money each time your try to race.
Now when I say you don't have traditional VS multiplayer, what I mean is there are no lobbies or host etc. When you are playing in a global event you get to race against 3 or 4 players who hold a similar time to you in that event or B or any n a friends/rivals you have who are playing at the same time as you, you can only see their ghostly images if they are within a certain distance of your own character. It's a little like Dark Souls in that respect.
My and 2 friends were in a party last night, dipping in and out of different global events racing each other and the other players in the same event, it was really nice. There was a range of skill between the 3 of us, but you are all always earning money and you always have someone else with similar score to try and outdo anyway.
You can also create a custom event so you can do a specific game type with certain restrictions and only your friends can join it.
The whole game is really tied together very well with a very comprehensive levelling up system and hundreds and hundreds of boards, outfits and pieces of gear with their own stats. So if you can't quite get a get enough score on a level because you character is only level 4 (and the global event has a cap of Level 7 equipment) you can go away or keep trying, level up a bit, buy some better stuff and try again with a faster or trickier character.
It is a really cool way of keeping you trying to outdo yourself, without ever really excluding anyone.
As you play any map you can also places GEOTAGS , which are SSX's equivalent of Orbs. Collect one of these and you will earn a few thousand credits, it will of been placed by another player somewhere in the world.
You can also place these yourself, the longer your GEOTAG goes without being collected, the more money you will earn when it eventually is.
The whole credit system is absolutely ingenious and it constantly encourages you to play and beat scores and place geotags and enter global events.
First thing I did this morning was turn on my copy of SSX to see how many credits I had earned overnight from my friends not beating my times and the global events I had entered. XP and levels are persistent too.
Digital Crack.
My trigger finger is really hurting this morning after a long session of hammering in the R trigger. I call this feeling "Burnout Finger" as that is the game that usually gives this to me.
)So you'll of got the jist of it if you have played the demo, but here are a breakdown of the main game modes.
World tour basically one large protracted tutorial that takes you round every mountain in the game, you often don't have to come 1st to proceed to the next track, in fact if you fail too many times you are able to skip and move on.
DJ Atomika from Burnout Paradise makes a return to talk you through the menus and the "story" which is something to do with some guy being more famous than team SSX or something.
Every so often you even get "treated" to an ugly motion comic that flies past so fast you can't keep up (Anybody else spot the Spartans?)
Here you get introduced to the main types of play
Race it
Trick it
Survive it
Race it and trick it see you racing and tricking against some very forgiving AI, the 3rd one is a little more varied, the survive it maps usually make use of some different (often awful) mechanics.
There will be maps with giant giant jumps on them so you need the wingsuit to get around.
Other survive it courses are bastards strewn with trees and rocks, you have to equip armor which protects you fleshy body from damage; lose you armour and your health and you die. When you restart you get a little X on the map to see how far you made it last time, ala doodle jump.
Other survive modes make use of
headlamps (pitch black through tunnels)
Solar panels (go into unlit areas too long and freeze to death)
oxygen tanks (you have to top up your air with RB to stop yourself from blacking out at high altitude )
Ice picks (twisty turny ice levels where your picks help you to steer yourself away from sheer drops)
There are also avalanche escapes where the camera zooms right out and you are coming towards it, which an avalanche behind you. Reversed controls. ****
Feels like you are controlling a little RC snowboarder.
Quite varied, but can't say I'm a fan of any of the GEAR other than the wingsuit.
Throughout global tour you can level up any of the 10 or so characters to give them better abilities as well as purchase higher level equipment which may make them better at tricks or boosting or give them more armour etc.
World tour feels like just one big tutorial and I'm looking forward to completing it.
So that is the kind annoying mode out of the way, and the mode I suspect the edge review was almost entirely based upon the meat and potatoes of the game are the remaining two modes
Explore
This is the game mode seen in the demo, time and trick attack modes where the aim is to get GOLD on every single course.
Here you can also see your friends/rivals ghosts and compete against them to earn some extra money and XP to use making your character faster, boostier and trickier.
Survive it also features in here, requiring your to hurtle through dangerous conditions as fast as you can without dying.
A big part of the enjoyment here is the competitive aspect replaying maps your friends have played and trying to beat their times. If you beat their time you actually get some extra cash and if you fail to beat it, when they next turn on their console they will be given some extra cash too.
You'll of seen a far more basic version of this in Need for Speed and Burnout Crash.
Global Events
This is about as close to Multiplayer as the game offers you may of heard , there is no traditional multiplayer, both online or offline.
You can enter a global event for free, or sometimes you have to pay your in game money to enter.
You can see the number of players trying the same challenge and you can see the prize pool (which will often be into the billions)
The events are time, so you can enter at any time during the time it is available, which may be from just 30 minutes to a whole week, you play the track and get the best score you can.
At the end of the course you will be graded into Diamond , platinum , gold, silver or bronze. Depending on the relative scores of the other players who have entered. So to get diamond you have to have a score in the top 10% of all the players.
Money in the prize pool is allocated to everyone depending on which category they fell into. When the event has finished, you will be awarded cash depending on your standing within the event.
As more people beat other peoples scores (or don't I suppose) your ranking can drop, the game will send you a notification if this happens.
The good thing about this is, you can enter any global event as many times as you like to push your score higher and higher and get into the other escalons of players, thus hopefully securing yourself more money when it is over. You will also be earning money each time your try to race.
Now when I say you don't have traditional VS multiplayer, what I mean is there are no lobbies or host etc. When you are playing in a global event you get to race against 3 or 4 players who hold a similar time to you in that event or B or any n a friends/rivals you have who are playing at the same time as you, you can only see their ghostly images if they are within a certain distance of your own character. It's a little like Dark Souls in that respect.
My and 2 friends were in a party last night, dipping in and out of different global events racing each other and the other players in the same event, it was really nice. There was a range of skill between the 3 of us, but you are all always earning money and you always have someone else with similar score to try and outdo anyway.
You can also create a custom event so you can do a specific game type with certain restrictions and only your friends can join it.
The whole game is really tied together very well with a very comprehensive levelling up system and hundreds and hundreds of boards, outfits and pieces of gear with their own stats. So if you can't quite get a get enough score on a level because you character is only level 4 (and the global event has a cap of Level 7 equipment) you can go away or keep trying, level up a bit, buy some better stuff and try again with a faster or trickier character.
It is a really cool way of keeping you trying to outdo yourself, without ever really excluding anyone.
As you play any map you can also places GEOTAGS , which are SSX's equivalent of Orbs. Collect one of these and you will earn a few thousand credits, it will of been placed by another player somewhere in the world.
You can also place these yourself, the longer your GEOTAG goes without being collected, the more money you will earn when it eventually is.
The whole credit system is absolutely ingenious and it constantly encourages you to play and beat scores and place geotags and enter global events.
First thing I did this morning was turn on my copy of SSX to see how many credits I had earned overnight from my friends not beating my times and the global events I had entered. XP and levels are persistent too.
Digital Crack.
My trigger finger is really hurting this morning after a long session of hammering in the R trigger. I call this feeling "Burnout Finger" as that is the game that usually gives this to me.
Then pinched my housemates copy of BD to play!
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