However skilled professional snowboarders are, you’ll never catch Shaun White on these slopes.

SSX, one of the most renowned arcade snowboarding games of all time, returns to your console with plenty of speed, frustration and a ton of dubstep.

The SSX series flourished over the previous decade amid a gaming environment with an intense over-saturation of extreme sports games. That time has passed and EA has revived the series with some pretty strong results.

One of the big new features of the game is its dynamic mountain ranges that EA modelled on real mountains. In the game’s brief single-player mode you tackle nine of the mountains called Deadly Descents. In this mode, you are introduced to all the different playable characters, each with individual statistics making them better for either races or trick events.

This mode also features a horrifyingly bad tacked-on story. It is so awful that they introduce each character’s back-story through a motion comic. Not only are motion comics a terrible way to tell a story, but the ones here don’t even have vocal dialogue. Granted, having voice actors read the terrible writing probably wouldn’t be that great either. It all just feels slapped together at the last minute. There was no real reason to have a story in the first place.

All you need to know for this mode is that you are attempting to survive the nine deadliest descents in the world. This will take you from mountains like Everest to Kilimanjaro.

Story aside, the Deadly Descents are pretty unique and require a special strategy to survive each one. Each descent has a threat. The first one you face is trees blocking the track and in order to have a good chance of surviving the descent, you need to equip your character with armour so they can take a bit of a beating.

Some of these gimmicks work very well and add a new degree of intensity to the snowboarding. The other ones present a bit of an issue. With this reboot of SSX, EA has gone and made everything bigger and faster — much faster. It feels like another EA franchise, Burnout, beautifully capturing a sense of speed so great that it barely feels like you are in control. Factor that into snowboarding that asks for some pretty extreme precision, and it no longer feels like you have any control at all.

The most frustrating descents are ones that require you to equip a headlamp, which is supposed to light your way but instead only does a great job of not showing you the various precipices where you can fall to your death.

Some of the the descents also require an oxygen tank due to the high altitude. Run out of oxygen and your snowboarder blacks out. Unfortunately, blacking out the whole screen makes any kind of quick progress feel impossible. Still, the extra dimension of having a survival event in the mix along with racing and tricks adds some much-needed variety to the game.

The way to acquire these survival tools, along with new boards and suits, is through an RPG-like loot system. Before every race you can buy boards from a store with a random assortment of wares. Each piece of equipment has its own individual stats that make it better for certain events or terrain. Equipment is colour-coded by rarity in a manner very similar to the way games like Diablo organize equipment.

Each character has an individual level as well. Obviously, the higher the level the better equipment they can get. You purchase these items with credits earned from completing various events. It is definitely a fun system that makes the gear part of the game far more interesting.

The speed and feel of the snowboarding is great, despite not feeling like actual snowboarding in the process. It is one of the main aspects that will keep you coming back long after the roughly five hours it takes to complete the Deadly Descent mode.

Other features that will keep players coming back for more are the Explore and Global Event modes. These use an all-encompassing leaderboard of sorts, a feature introduced in Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit. The leaderboard notifies players whenever their score has been beaten. It is simple, but extremely addictive.

Explore mode features 150 different variations of the mountains and has you competing with friends for a high score while Global Event mode has people across the world competing simultaneously for large sums of credits.

SSX changes just enough of its gaming formula to make things fun and fresh, while keeping the components that made it beloved in the first place. It will definitely play on nostalgia for old fans but there’s enough for newcomers as well. While the single-player largely feels like an extended tutorial, there are plenty of slopes in the other modes that give the game some legs.

Ulimately, however, the SSX reboot is a lot like dubstep: fast and fun, but missing the necessary depth to make it something truly great.

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Image: Supplied