Snowboard Kids returns with more content, more colourful and vibrant visuals and more creative courses. It all sounds great on paper but ultimately doesn't hold a candle to the first game's simplistic charm and quality-over-quantity focus.
The new hub world is more an interactive menu than a hub world, allowing you to select modes via various buildings in Snow Town and access new content such as Wendy's Internet, which is essentially a useless statistic repository that hides information that was more readily available in the first game. Similarly, the story present in this outing is less a story and more a series of sketches providing an intro and outro to each course. It's of little value, serving predominantly as a means to justify wackier courses--for example, in one case Wendy shrinks the group to facilitate a ride through her house in miniature form.
Course variety has been amped up--there's an outer space course and a haunted house course, for example--and each is littered with nice touches such as themed ski lifts and even themed character costumes. Course design itself, though, is arguably less accomplished than it was in the first game. There are now a small handful of boss stages, too, which take inspiration from Diddy Kong Racing but make less sense than they did in that game except in the case of the main antagonist.
Control remains much the same as it was in Snowboard Kids with some minor tweaks. It's now possible to deflect projectiles by jumping and grabbing your board with precision timing; combat is slightly more dynamic as a result. The tweaks to the trick system are a double-edged sword; I love that you can perform multiple flips mid-air, but find the removal of character-specific special tricks and ability to hold grabs a little odd.
Disappointingly, the music in Snowboard Kids 2 is a far cry from the classic tunes in the first game, many simply reworks of those tracks or new compositions that simply aren't as good.
Overall, whilst it's bigger-is-better approach is a mixed bag, Snowboard Kids 2 is absolutely a Snowboard Kids game at heart, with gameplay near-identical to that of the classic original. It doesn't make the first game redundant and isn't redundant itself, but rather gives us more Snowboard Kids, and that can't be a bad thing.
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...2022-02-03 09:05:08.039534+00
I always go back and forth on wether I prefer this over the first game or not. I love being able to deflect enemy projectiles, and the greatly toned down AI makes single player-playthroughs much less rage inducing than the first game which probably had the worst rubberband AI of any racing game ever. The more whimsical courses are great, but some of the textures have aged horrifically especially when you see a lot of stretched textures all over the place. It also feels more... bumpy? I dunno, it feels less like snowboarding and just more like a regular kart racer to me. The first game had better physics. I also hate that they got rid of character spefcific tricks. ColdVein's review pretty much describes how I feel about this game.
- Be respectful! All the community rules apply here.
- Keep your comments focused on the game. Don't post randomness/off-topic comments. Jokes are fine, but don't post tactless/inappropriate ones.
- Don't get in arguments with people here, or start long discussions. Use the boards for extended discussion.
- Don't use this space to complain about the average rating, chart position, genre voting, others' reviews or ratings, or errors on the page.
- Don't comment just to troll/provoke. Likewise, don't respond to trollish comments; just report them and ignore them.
- Any spoilers should be placed in spoiler tags as such: [spoiler](spoiler goes here)[/spoiler]
Note: Unlike reviews, comments are considered temporary and may be deleted/purged without notice.