Well, despite my nasty intro to this article, 1080: Avalanche does seem to be a fun racing game with a lot going for it. However, I don’t think “lastability” is one of its strengths. I beat all three of the standard cups in just over an hour of playing. The first two were pitifully easy, but the third required me to start over once or twice. After beating these three (Normal, Hard, and Expert), I unlocked a fourth cup that appears to be a remixing of the earlier tracks, but with much, much harder opponents.

The tracks are designed for high speeds, but there are also many turns and obstacles, not to mention a surprising number of shortcuts and alternate paths. The game’s style dictates that everything stay more or less in the realm of reality, though some of the tree formations and ice tunnels seem unlikely. A few tracks temporarily leave the mountain for a short trip through a logging factory or ski lodge, while one of the final levels takes place almost entirely in a downhill town. Many of the levels have interactive elements and scripted events, including NPC skiers and boarders, mild car traffic, falling rocks, and wildlife stampedes. Seeing a falcon swoop down into your view and then soar off is an impressive sight, even when you see it happen at exactly the same point on later runs.

At the end of each cup is an avalanche stage that simply challenges you to survive the level and reach the end before time runs out; there is no opponent other than nature. These levels start off pretty tame, with the first seismic event being more rumble than bite. The second one adds rockslides, while the third is an all-out avalanche. This stage is truly awesome, with excellent sound effects, screen-shaking, rumbling (put down the WaveBird for once), and so much snow being kicked up that it’s hard to even see your character. It’s also very difficult, but the normal system of three lives is thrown out once you reach the avalanche levels, so you can just try over and over until you beat it or give up.

The game tries hard to be a pure racer, and its best achievement in that regard is a great sense of speed on the harder surfaces and steeper levels. The levels are also nicely varied and always interesting. It’s too bad they aren’t a bit longer (finish times are usually one minute to one and a half minutes), but there is a decent number of tracks across the different cups. The main problem with the racing gameplay is that you only compete with one opponent at a time. Maybe that’s how it’s done in real snowboarding, but the result in this game is that you go through many races hardly ever seeing your opponent, whether he’s ahead of you or behind you. The tracks are certainly large enough to support at least four racers, if not more, so I don’t really understand this design decision. The game would be more exciting with a bit of interaction on the course.

The new trick system is certainly simpler than the old one. Just press one of the face buttons and a direction to grab, or press R and a direction to spin/flip. There don’t seem to be any special moves, and the game’s modest jumps usually only give time for one or two tricks at most. That’s if you’re dumb enough to even attempt tricking during a match race. The game offers very little incentive to do so; performing tricks just builds up a “power” meter, and when that fills up, you gain the one-time ability to knock down an opponent. Ooooooh! Nevermind that; if you waste your time doing tricks and trying to land them, you’ll have trouble just catching up to the other guy, much less ramming into him. Weak, weak, weak. Maybe doing tricks would actually be a good strategy if they made you go faster, or opened up special shortcuts, or something viably useful to the racing gameplay.

The famously tough landings of the original 1080 have been replaced with a new balancing system. If you make a crappy landing, the game will make you dizzy instead of letting you fall. In order to get un-dizzy, you have to spin the control stick in whatever direction the screen shows. It’s not hard to do within the time limit, but since it requires a completely different motion than is used in racing, this feature doesn’t synch up well with the rest of the game. And if you get flustered and can’t rotate enough within the time limit, you fall off the board anyway.

Multiplayer was definitely a weakness of the original game; it offered only straightforward two-player racing. Avalanche expands the multiplayer capability to four players, but you can still only race. There is no multiplayer trick attack like in Wave Race: Blue Storm. Plus, the course selection for multiplayer games is very limited, and the framerate is noticeably worse with more than two players. I haven’t been able to try the LAN mode, but hopefully it at least has better performance. The player cap is still at four, whether you play splitscreen or on a LAN.

So far, it looks like 1080: Avalanche will be remembered much like its predecessor still is. It’s a fast racing game with interesting tracks, and that’s about it. The trick system feels tacked on (and is treated as such by the game itself), and the multiplayer doesn’t offer many options at all. This is the kind of game I would rent to see the avalanches and burn through the cups.