Tuesday, July 29, 2003

Game Review: Downhill Domination


Are you equiped for the challenge? Incog Inc. brings the yet another extreme sports title to the PS2, but this isn't another Tony Hawk, Dave Mirra, Kelly Slater clone, welcome to Xtreme mountain biking! Awesome dude :lol: Incog has now churned out 3 top quality games all completely different from each other all gems in their own right. As with all Incog titles you have a wide array of characters to choose from, my fav is T-Bag!Multiple pick-ups on your race down,energy boost/combat upgrade/adrenaline boost/ X-tra points, and plenty of bonuses, from cool videos, real pro mountain bikers to unlock, to better bike accessories and real life sponsors like SoBe/ O'NEAL/ebay/Oakley/snapple!First impression I had when I played was, "wow this is SSX on mountain bikes" then I started tooling with the weapons and thought "cool, SSX + Road Rash" then after earned some dead presidents I brought my ride to the shop and thought, " oooh upgrades, SSX+Road Rash with a dash of Gran Turismo". DD's tracks are looooooooooooong, like 4 times longer than SSX! One track, Mt. Konawaki takes you from the summit over and thru an observatory, thru a volcano, alone the edge of a 500 foot cliff and down to the beach below. DD's tracks are exactly what I wanna see in SSX3 (but with snow) You have so many spliting and intersecting routes to choose from that you trully feel like you're in control of where you go and you're not stuck on a predetermined path. When you're riding down these trails at breakneck speed you can see the amount of detail Incog put into each level from the vegitation to the hikers and wild life which you can run over and be attacked by! (watch those bears). It's also here where my biggest problem with this game lies, there are more than enough opportunities to catch BIG air but alot of times you'll find yourself plummeting into oblivion because what you though was a jump.....wasn't :( The music selection is typical extreme sports genre tunes, nothing special but not as bad as some games. The character voice over's are above average, but still steriotypical....dude. DD has weeks of replay value with the pleathora of additional games modes like career, specailized career, freeride, freestyle, moshbowl, arcade, versus. Completing each of these modes and earning cash will help you in unlocking the Xcellent bonus's, secret stuff.Overall DD is a solid, clean, well designed addition to the flooded genre of Xtreme games from the folks who introduced us to car combat all those years ago. The major flaws with the game are really minimal, awkward control scheme with no option to rearrange the controller, and some abyss's of doom that intially appear to be opportunities for BIG air.

7/10