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 AIRBLADE
Extreme sports, courtesy Sony's AXN and ESPN's X-Games,
have captured worldwide attention and game developer
Criterion has just released their most anticipated title
Airblade for PlayStation 2. Airblade is sports-simulation
at its best where booster packs and back flips in mid-air
are the sole reasons for adrenaline. Airblade kicks
off with some corporate bad guys busting into your house
and kidnapping your roommate, Oscar. Right before quitting
his job at the big, bad GCP Corporation, Oscar stole
a prototype hoverboard, dubbed the Airblade, made with
technology that could render fossil fuels obsolete,
and his former employers want it back. It's up to you
as the vaguely counterculture Ethan to use the Airblade
to rescue Oscar and turn GCP's operations upside down.
The subsequent in-game movies contain plenty of "stick
it to The Man" sentiments that culminate in a rather
anticlimactic conclusion. But thankfully, Airblade puts
a greater emphasis on gameplay and the main story mode
in Airblade is mission-based. Each level has a number
of objectives like knocking over GCP thugs, smashing
through wanted signs with your picture on them, or destroying
various pieces of GCP equipment, all of which you must
complete before your allotted time runs out infusing
a certain urgency to the game. It can also make the
game exceptionally frustrating, as it takes a lot of
trial and error to figure out how to complete all the
objectives, compounded by the game's brutal difficulty
level making it necessary to run through most levels
several times. The other single-player modes are slightly
more conventional. The stunt attack mode gives you performance-specific
goals to complete, like pulling off an especially tough
big trick combo before you can advance to the next level.
Score attack, which also serves as a multiplayer mode,
simply challenges you to beat certain level scores.
Airblade handles the graphics well and the environments
are all large multi-tiered affairs with an appropriate
number of rails, ramps, and half-pipes. The levels are
also busy with pedestrians who don't much care for it
when you race by them, and they'll tell you so regularly.
Ethan's trick animations all look good, and there are
a few nice, smaller touches, such as the dust that kicks
up behind your hoverboard. At Rs 999 from Milestone
Interactive, Airblade is a fun, entirely playable game
that puts a unique twist on the current trend in skateboarding
games.
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