Snowboarding is a unique sport; it's not as simple as standing on a board and sliding down a mountain, there's a lifestyle too, a philosophy even, that's intertwined with every sweeping turn and ridiculous back flip. At the core of that lifestyle sits freedom; the freedom of the mountain. It's just you and the snow up there. Sadly though, the developers of Stoked disagree, they don't think freedom or philosophies or fun have any place in a snowboarding game, oh no, they think that the entire ethos of the sport can be distilled into three words; frustration, annoyance and awfullybrokenanimationsystem. Which is a word.

Stoked casts you in the role of a rookie boarder, who you create before you start playing, then tasks you with working your way up the fame ladder by completing challenges, beating pro scores and getting sponsored. You start off on a training mountain, being taught the ropes by a famous real life snowboarder, whose vocal delivery has all the charisma and personality of a lethargic punch to the kidneys. He explains how to pull off the arsenal of tricks at your disposal, all of which will be entirely nonsensical to anyone less than well versed in the nomenclature of the sport. Flicking the right stick up performs a jump, holding it down and then flicking it performs a larger jump. Steering, spins and flips are the left stick, with grabs a combination of triggers and the right stick. Quite often it feels like you need an extra hand.

The scheme is unnatural and far from intuitive; the reason Skate's flickit controls worked so well is because there was a direct correlation between the movement of your fingers and the movement of your character, here it's more like the things your fingers do are communicated down a soup filled tube, which is only loosely connected to the actual game. A prime example of the useless nature of the system can be found in the tutorials; if you push the left stick half way down, you perform a sort of balancing act on the tail of your board, but to push the stick all the way down, in order to perform a big jump, you have to go past half way down. More often than not you'll fail the tutorial simply because the game decides you've pulled off a tail slide instead of readying yourself for a leap. It's shoddy design, frustratingly implemented and should never have made it into the full retail release. And things get worse...

The game boasts of its sandbox nature, that it's one of those go anywhere, do anything titles the kids love so much. This is a massive lie. Sliding around the 5 mountains on offer is reasonably pleasant, once you get past the intricacies of the control system, but if you want to progress in the game you're going to have to do challenges. These challenges are focussed on incredibly specific parts of the mountain, and usually involve beating a computer set score. Fair enough, you might say, that sounds like a reasonable way to move forwards, except that the difficulty curve is so steep that even the hardiest pro-boarder would think twice about trying to conquer it. You're not dropped in at the deep end, you're hurled, head first, blindfold, bound and probably severely beaten, insulted as you fall and offered no help whatsoever, save for the inane bleating of faceless opponents who goad your every pathetic, rage affirming failure. After twenty minutes I was ready to hunt down all the voice actors who had contributed to this work and break each and every one of their fingers. Luckily, being every bit the consummate professional, I was able to resist the urge.

The five mountains you can choose from offer little in the way of variation; snow, rocks, trees, snow, different rocks, snow covered chalets, trees, the end. As you beat more challenges you unlock different equipment, all of which feels exactly the same due to the appallingly floaty animations; it feels like you're hovering an inch or so away from the ground at most times, on a cushion of amateurish physics. The graphics look decent enough in still photographs, but in motion they're jerky and confused, the camera often pointing in the wrong direction or entirely obscured by poorly rendered trees. The character models look like shaven monkeys, and the rag doll physics are some of the worst I've ever seen. Collision detection is abysmal, and whether or not you land a trick seems reliant entirely on the mystical forces of chance rather than logic or common ruddy sense.

The music is reasonably inoffensive, featuring a swathe of unknown bands who make noise that compliments your repeated falls, the sound effects too are pleasant, with snow crunching how you imagine snow would crunch in the given situation. As I may have mentioned before, the voice acting is of a level usually reserved for public information films explaining to dullards that it's best if they don't put their faces into toasters, and, infuriatingly, cannot be turned off.

The thing about Stoked is that , somewhere, at the bottom of a swirling maelstrom of bad ideas, terrible implementation, rage spurring shod and embarrassing mistakes, there is a good game. It's weak and undernourished, probably missing a couple of toes from frostbite, but it is there. The simple joy of strapping something to your feet and pointing it in a downwards direction has been well captured, but then utterly destroyed by the repetitive, brain swilling madness of the challenges. With a bit more experience, and a little more know how, Stoked could have been an enjoyable diversion, as it is, it's a broken, twisted shambles, best left out on a bare mountainside without a jumper.

Reviewed by Harry Slater for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).