Who has red hair, a plethora of freckles and loves a good dare? If you’re thinking of Pepper Ann, the 12-year-old girl from ABC’s self-titled cartoon, then you’d be wrong. In fact, the person in question is actually Shaun White, a 22-year-old snowboarder that has been at this game since the age of 13. Known as “The Flying Tomato,” he has received his first video-game franchise from the publishers of Ubisoft.

Under the care of Ubisoft Montreal, Shaun White Snowboarding is positioned to be one of the Ubisoft’s flagship titles for its attempt at create a foothold with the sports market. In the past, Ubisoft obtained the rights to use Vijay Singh to be the face of their golf franchise and purchased all the team sports assets from Microsoft. They’ve even went to the extent of creating a sports game catered to girls titled Ener-G for the Nintendo DS. So with Shaun White, a 2006 Olympic gold medalist for men’s halfpipe, they potentially had their own extreme sports franchise on par with Tony Hawk’s success with Activision. It’s just too bad that the game is riddled with tedious gameplay and uninteresting elements.

Starting off the game with a tutorial, Shaun White Snowboarding isn’t the most inviting extreme sports title on the market. The tutorial is among the worst you’ll encounter as the text providing advice is gone in a flash as you snowboard down the mountain. The maneuvers are difficult to pull off when you first begin the game, so don’t expect the tutorial to open your eyes to the ways of Shaun White Snowboarding. In fact, it took about seven or eight trips down the same mountain to fully grasp the controls. Whatever the case, be prepared to struggle for the first few hours accomplishing tricks and accepting challenges on the map.

For the most part, reaching the challenges is difficult due to the controls. The challenges are represented by large icons on the mountains. Many times you’ll fly right by them and have to go down the mountain again to get the challenge. The challenges have four different indicators to determine how difficult they are: a green circle for easy, blue square for medium, black diamond for hard, and two black diamonds for the hardest. There’s a map and radar on the bottom right of the screen, but it’s useless due to how limited it is.

The portion of the game that is the most dissatisfying is the platforming sections that have you jumping to reach coins for Shaun White. Navigating the mountains to find these coins aren’t fun and are contradicting to the purpose of snowboarding, which is to dig deep into the snow and carve your name as you groove down the mountain. Why should gamers be forced to collect little items down the mountain to advance the story?

There’s some hope in terms of reducing the monotonous gameplay such as the warp system. The warp system allows you to switch between places on the map by placing a marker for your destination of choice. There’s also focus abilities to take advantage of that grant you superpowers for a limited time. Focus abilities such as speed boost, power check and the ability to get more air in your jumps are provided, but they’re wasted due to the forced nature of performing tricks to fill the bar back up since the abilities drain quickly. Sure, they’ll give you access to new areas and the ability to destroy objects in your way, but it’s an exhaustive feature that doesn’t reach its potential.

The story is shallow and lifeless – it’ll bore you to tears! The cut scenes that are presented are terrible since there’s no coherent storyline. You’ll start off creating your own character (male or female) and then begin running errands for Shaun White by collecting items for him. You may enjoy the fact there are no time limits or paths to follow, but the way Ubisoft Montreal has presented the world is difficult to get into since there’s no quality storyline.

The multiplayer is a hit and a miss. There are a total of three types of challenges exclusive to the multiplayer including: Rat Race, King of the Hill, and Betting Challenge. You can invite your friends into any challenge you’ve unlocked during the single-player mode. Up to 16 players can ride on a player’s hosted mountain, which in turn is the best aspect online. It’s entertaining to see fifteen of your friends riding around on the mountain. There’s also an online leaderboard to keep track of your friends and how they play. Hopefully you have friends with the game so you can share the experience because otherwise, the online is dull.

Shaun White Snowboarding is a decent looking title on the 360 as the mountains are huge and look great. Disappointingly, the rider animations are poor and could’ve used tuning. Even worse is that falling down is almost non-existent as players will bounce back up two seconds later without any damage.

Lastly, the Shaun White Snowboarding – Target Limited Edition has an extra mountain, character models to select, a few added challenges, and a couple other extras but none of them are worthy to recommend purchasing the title. No word on if this content will be available for download in the future for Xbox Live users, so buying the disc is the only method of playing this content.

Gameplay: 6.5
The half-pipe is probably among the disappointing sections of Shaun White Snowboarding; you’ll fall flat on your face many times without any idea of how to improve your half-pipe skills.

Graphics: 7.4
Next time around, Ubisoft Montreal should concentrate on a more realistic approach to physics and the characters crashing into the snow.

Sound: 7.0
The soundtrack has great musicians such as Bob Dylan, Blue Oyster Cult, Jefferson Airplane, MGMT, Living Colour, and Run DMC on its soundtrack. On the other hand, the soundtrack also includes terrible music from Audioslave, Metro Station, and Stabbing Westward so it all evens out.

Difficulty: Easy / Medium

Concept: 7.0
Even though the concept of an open-world is poorly executed, Ubisoft Montreal can make something out of this in the future with sequels.

Multiplayer: 6.5
Pressing up on the D-pad allows you to jump online and right on the D-pad permits you the ability to set up private chat rooms. The easy access to online is brilliant, but it’s too bad that it ends up being dull in the long run.

Overall: 6.7
Shaun White’s first snowboarding game is a mess that misses the entire idea of what snowboarding is all about. With no real sense of speed or thrills, Shaun White Snowboarding comes up short in differentiating itself between both a simulation and an arcade title, so be prepared for a Jekyll and Hyde of a video game.