There's more to the snowboarding industry than just pulling off fancy tricks, there's also the brands. Famous brands that made their fame in extreme sports have become more popular in recent years and lots of new companies have made their way to the scene. This is incorporated into the game Stoked from developers Bongfish Interactive Entertainment. The game is based around getting famous and working your way up to getting sponsorship deals from the top brands. It's no surprise then that the first thing the player is faced with when starting a career is to customize their character. Initially only a few clothing items are available, but the rewards will come later. As well as licensed brands, fans of the sport may also recognise the appearance of professionals who seem to enjoy giving you stick.

Gameplay:

Those not so acquainted with snowboarding games might be a little bemused by the harsh tutorial at first. Doing the basics is fine, but the game doesn't actually tell you which buttons to press to meet the requirements – you can however watch some strange sounding 'pro' do it over and over effortlessly. Stoked is one game where the back button will see plenty of use as it's the instant, no punishment restart button. During a challenge, pressing the back button on the controller will put you back to the start and it can be done at any point, so if you see your character is about to break his back after poorly judging a flip and you can't bear to watch, then no worries. The only downside are the cheesy one liners the spectators will throw at you for bailing. As the game progresses, more mountains are unlocked (a total of five) in various locations around the world like Switzerland and Chile each with about 50 standard challenges plus sponsorship trials and competitions. Your boarder will be dropped off somewhere high from the helicopter and going downhill several icons indicating a challenge will be visible. In between them there's plenty of bumps and hills to practice tricks and build up a high score. Discovering a large jump or drop is very satisfying and almost gives you that upside down stomach feeling, cringing slightly that you manage to nail the landing. The challenges vary in difficulty, some requiring just one or two tricks others needing some pretty complex combinations, especially so for competitions and for sealing sponsorship deals. There are only a few different types of challenges and the most common are either beating someone's high score doing a certain type of trick e.g. a grab or doing some specific tricks. A lot of them can be done first time, some will need a few restarts and others will test your patience and memory. After a while certain tricks will become almost second nature but every so often pausing the game and looking at the grab bible will be vital. This is easy enough as the game instantly pauses and it's easy to navigate the menu and find the trick but as you may have guessed, it only displays grabs and not grinds.

This is where not knowing the extreme sports lingo could harm the gameplay experience, it's been a while since the last boarding game and I wasn't immediately able to remember what the game meant by doing a switch trick (just doing a 180 turn so it switches your stance before doing the trick). Maybe most players probably won't have this trouble however. As well as doing mid-air tricks like grabs, spins and flips the mountains have an abundance of well placed cabins just over drops and fallen trees which make excellent places to grind. I found grinding was a bit of a trial and error affair, it seems the room for error is minimal when it comes to different grinds, depending on the boarders stance there can be three areas of the board which give different tricks, and jumping onto a tree or a rooftop and landing on the right part of the board can be challenging. Completing challenges will result in fame point rewards, once a certain fame rank is reached sponsors will start to notice and invites will come in to prove your worth them letting you wear their brand such as Vans, Volcom, Quicksilver and plenty of others. This in turn unlocks more fame points and also new attire which can be equipped.

Graphics:

Given the size of the areas and the mountains that are accessible, the level of detail is impressive and depending on the weather it's possible to see large distances with the scenery still retaining detail. As everything is mostly white, it might be possible for a game of this type to look a bit plain but there seems to be enough organic features and the snow itself has some level of detail as well as tracks created by the players board. These also help out with the gameplay as original tracks stay in place even after a restart acting as a sort of guide or reminder. The character models don't seem as impressive or as detailed as the landscape, close up there is a lack of detail but it doesn't matter much because most of the time the camera isn't that close. Gamers will also notice that they can check the forecast. The weather system means that if there is no snow for a while then more rocky surfaces will appear on the mountain but if it snows there will be more areas to board on.

Sound:

The general sound quality is superb in all categories it seems. The noise of the snow moving beneath the board and getting thrown away when turning is clear and crisp. The licensed soundtrack fits the style of the game well and although individual songs cant be selected, its possible to omit genres from the playlist which is a welcomed feature. Its even possible to choose an 'anthem' that gets played when your character completes challenges or jumps out of the helicopter.

Longevity:

Average extreme sports games fans will have little difficulty tackling most of the challenges, so if a mountain has 5 runs with 10 challenges on each with most of them taking around a minute, the only thing that may delay you is taking a break as it becomes a little tiresome. The odd difficult one will pop up and they do get harder as the game progresses but its quite a soft curve. The areas that will surely add time are the competitions and the pro challenges. The Xbox Live game is based on beating other players scores and stealing their places on the leaderboards which are reset weekly. Given that it doesn't seem to be a full priced game, there's plenty of content on offer. Getting all the achievements means beating the pros, which unless you're a natural, will take some time.

Overall:

It's hard to say if this is a game for everyone, at times it seems the number of challenges that have to be completed can be fairly dull, but pulling of a tricky combination of grabs and flips can be satisfying although very demanding at times. Not everything has to be completed when it's accessed, the option to switch mountains and routes is there so harder parts can be ignored and re-visited later. The game's presentation is well done from the detailed landscapes to the menus, everything points towards what snowboarding fans should feel comfortable with and they themselves will enjoy the number of challenges and competitions on offer as well as the more elaborate tricks. Snowboarding games on the Xbox 360 are few and far between, but Stoked seems like a solid one which hits a good balance between testing patience and fun.