Of course the absurdity of the goals doesn’t end there, there are tons of goals that are tossed at you with no explanation. Take the Chicago level for example, in lieu of St. Patty’s day, a goal asks you to dye the river green. All you’ll see is a barrel that is placed next to the river, the casual gamer will go, ‘Hey that’s easy enough, all I have to do is run into it and I’m finished.’ But when they go to do it, they’ll simply crash into it and fall down. The proper way of finishing the goal is by grinding along the nearby rail and jumping over the barrel (I guess that jumping over the barrels frightens them into jumping into the river or something) until it falls into the river. There are numerous goals that fall into this same category, I’m playing an Xtreme Sports game, not a freakin Adventure game here, I don’t need puzzles cluttering up my enjoyment.
At times though, it’s well worth suffering through all of the frustration, not in hopes of unlocking new levels, but rather, watching the next chapter unfold in my road trip. To be honest, the levels are serviceable at best, the game is mildly entertaining but all of that is just the sideshow, the main attraction here are the highly entertaining video clips. I can’t remember a game where I would actually want to unlock videos rather than the next area but oh well, there’s always a first time for everything.
The game controls fairly well and the physics are spot on. In case you’re not familiar with
MHPB, the controls basically mimic those of their skateboarding cousin,
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The only huge differences are the absence of the revert feature and the variations between the fakie stances, other than that, they’re practically identical. X jumps, Square and O perform tricks, double tapping up adds a multiplier to your trick. Even manuals and flatland tricks (a new addition) are performed in the same manner, the only difference is that you have to bunnyhop in
MHPB2 in order to perform a manual.
Trick lines are prevalent throughout the majority of the levels and to be honest, they’re fairly well done. The levels are really well designed, featuring tons of obstacles and objects for you to trick off of. In addition, the areas are just huge, not quite up to par with Z-Axis’ excellent
Aggressive Inline, but definitely larger than
THPS3. Though not all of the levels are astounding (Chicago really comes to mind here) the majority of them are fun and enjoyable.
Visually, the game is a few notches above
THPS3 but not by much. The riders are a little blocky and could have benefited from a couple more frames of animations. At times, the moves look awkward, almost as if they’re missing a couple of frames. Many of the moves in real life happen so quickly that it’s hard to see all of the action, I suppose this is the school of thought that the artists were following.
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