Big Air Freestyle review (GameCube)

The game ends up feeling about as unfinished as it does unplanned, as it's also quite buggy. You'll occasionally fall out of levels, and on one particular occasion, lapping the last-place rider switched our race position from first to tenth. The split-screen multiplayer support is just a multiplayer adaptation of the game's basic gameplay, only with some pretty noticeable slowdown. The game's boundaries are pretty poorly executed as well. If you get caught executing a trick when you encounter one of the game's invisible walls, you will end up crashing and very slowly slide down the invisible wall before regaining control of your bike. Unfortunately, with all the time that you will be spending in the air with this game, you will be encountering these problems often.

Graphically, Big Air Freestyle doesn't bring much to the table. On the surface, it looks more like something you'd see on the PlayStation 2 than on the GameCube. All the rider models are the same, excluding some of the hidden characters, and all the bike models are the same too, even across the various classes. The animation of the tricks is really stiff and mechanical, which further reduces whatever satisfaction you might get from performing them. The audio is decent at best--most of what you will hear is the sound of the bike's engines. They sound pretty good, from the whiny 125s to the throaty 500s, but all in all, it's a fairly limited sound palette. The soundtrack will take good care of you if you're into modern pop-punk. It features a lot of bands like Sugarcult, MXPX, and 311, though it doesn't deviate far from that path.

In the end, Big Air Freestyle doesn't offer much that can be recommended. It's buggy, the gameplay modes are shallow, and the graphics don't save it. With games like MX Superfly and Freekstyle already on the market, there's simply no reason to give Big Air Freestyle a second look.