Amped Freestyle Snowboarding, What can one say? Take a successful genre of Extreme sports add the power of the Xbox console and appearing on screens near you is a new king of the hill. 'Oh Yesö Amped Freestyle Snowboarding Rocks.

In Amped freestyle Snowboarding players assume the roll of a rookie snowboarding starting out on the road to Fame and Glory 'Oh lets not forget ultimately The World Number 1 Statusö As a rookie boarder you need to learn and this is where Amped comes into it's own. Starting as a rookie boarder you need to learn, after all we can't all just jump straight on the board and bust the biggest and best moves, this is where the game begins.

You start off selecting your Body Style, cloths board etc and your skills for which you shall begin your journey to be Number 1 in the World. You select levels of skill from 5 options, which are spin, balance, jump, speed and switch. You then head off to the mountain. Once at the Mountain there are various challenges all with rewards. Initially your goal is to gain exposure to gain exposure you need to gain a sponsor or two and learn some mega moves to start with you are challenged to achieve the highest score and gain some media coverage, Media Coverage is gained as you board down the mountain by busting the biggest trick possible when you see the Camera Men around the slopes. Red floating camera icons mark the points where cameramen lie in wait.

Moving on new and harder challenges lie in wait, creating a little media attention and busting a few cool moves whilst busting those high score challenges only opens the way to bigger better and harder challenges. The High Scores get Higher, The media get fussier and now you have to gain sponsors, explore the mountains and beat the mountain pro at his own game. Sound interesting? Well it is. Lets start off worth explore the mountain, explore the mountain could have been nothing more than it implies, but nothing in Amped is that easy.

In explore the mountain challenges you need to roam the mountain hunting for odd angry looking snowmen who could be anywhere and then knocking them over, 'Now I know your all thinkingö 'Easyö 'Well it's notö this is one of the trickiest challenges you will encounter on your eventual road to stardom. Next up you have sponsor challenges, this is simply a run down the face of a mountain whilst potential sponsor watch on, again sounds easy, again it's not! Each sponsor has their own unique likes and dislikes this becomes tricky when if you're like me and not maybe the best at grinds and that's what the sponsor likes! Complete these challenges and get plenty of free new cool stuff.

Finally there is the Pro Challenges, each mountain has a pro rider which to complete the challenge you must follow the hill pro and complete tricks at specific points, the main aim here is to complete higher scoring tricks than the pro you follow, fail and it's back to the top of the hill for another run; succeed and he'll teach you a new trick

Now that's all the challenges that await you out of the way, lets talk about the general game; initially Amped may not be everyone's cup of tea, frustrating controls and very few moves make the initial experience a little disheartening 'but don't be fooledö under the bonnet lies a truly unique Extreme sports game, ok in honesty the controls seemed odd as we are all so use to the Tony Hawks controls, lets get this straight now this is in no way a clone of Tony Hawks and has it's own controls which after about 30 minutes became like second nature as did they with Tony Hawks all those moons ago.

The game is constantly evolving, new harder sponsor challenges new higher and higher scores to beat fussier and fussier camera men who want more and more and more harder and harder pro's who love nothing more than making you look silly and new tricks to learn at every other turn almost, thi sgame is in for the long haul. You will not be able to pick it up and bust the best and biggest moves you will have to play, play, play to learn them as you proceed through over 120 different runs down the various mountains and various challenges featured within the game.

Overall Amped looks awesome throughout and munches up the power of the Xbox very nicely. The game not only plays great throughout but it is obvious from the start that a lot of time and thought have been put into not only the graphics but also the game play and even the replay value of the title, which is almost endless as you can always back track a mountain or two as you learn bigger and better tricks and crack open those previously set high scores which suddenly appear not so high using your new skills and tricks.

If you like extreme sports and snowboarding games you could do a lot worse than Amped Freestyle Snowboarding. If you are after a break from the normal race down the hill, bust some big moves type of game then this is a must have, personally I would say that no extreme sports fans Xbox collection is complete without the mighty Amped Freestyle Snowboarding.