GameSpot editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Excellent
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 07/26/2002
- Updated on: 05/17/2006
- Released on: 07/29/2002
- Originally published on GameSpot: Aggressive Inline (Xbox) Review
More often than not, only one developer is associated with the recent alternative sports boom. But back when all this skateboarding and biking business started in earnest, there were two. Neversoft had teamed up with Activision to deliver Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, which eschewed skateboarding realism for fast, well-defined gameplay. And California-based Z-Axis had teamed up with Rockstar Games to develop a skateboarding game of their own, called Thrasher: Skate and Destroy. Thrasher had a similar goal-based, time-limited structure, but the gameplay and control were far more rooted in reality. Needless to say, the Tony Hawk series blew up and spawned an entire line of similar products for Activision. Z-Axis blossomed on its own, moving from Rockstar to Acclaim and moving from skateboarding to BMX biking by developing the deeper-than-most Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX series. Now, after a few years of moderate success, Z-Axis and Acclaim have branched out to inline skating with Aggressive Inline, an excellent game that both borrows from previous alternative sports games and sets out in a new direction that will more than likely be copied by future games.
Aggressive Inline ranks up there with the best alternative sports games available.
Controlling the skater in Aggressive Inline should be familiar to anyone who has played any recent Tony Hawk game. Rather than going with the ultradeep trick system from the Dave Mirra series, Inline goes for a simpler scheme, requiring only one button to perform air tricks. But that doesn't mean that there aren't many tricks in the game. There are lots of different D-pad combinations that add up to a hefty number of grabs and flips, and you'll uncover special tricks as you go. The B button is used as a general action button. It starts goals if you're near a goal trigger, and it performs Airblade-like grabs onto horizontal and vertical poles positioned throughout the game's levels. The Y button performs grind tricks, and like in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, you can combo from one grind trick to the next without leaving the rail. Tony Hawk 3's revert, which lets you continue combos after landing a vert trick, is seen here as the cess slide, though the timing on the cess slide to manual is a bit trickier when you're first getting started. The cess slide is performed by hitting either the white or black button, and their relatively distant positioning on both of the standard Microsoft controllers makes working the cess slide into your combos a bit more difficult than it is in the PlayStation 2 version.
Aggressive Inline's levels are really quite huge. As a result, the old two-minute timer that just about every single previous game in the genre has used is history. You can skate around the levels at your own pace. The only time you'll have a time limit is when you start a time-based goal. The other thing you have to watch is your juice meter, which acts as both a countdown timer and your special meter. As you land tricks, the meter fills up. Wrecking or just standing around causes it to slowly drain. If it drains completely, the game ends, but keeping it filled is never difficult, so the meter seems more like a formality than something you actually need to be careful of.
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Aggressive Inline (Xbox):
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