Shaun White Skateboarding

Basic workers and objects in the game require a gauge of level 1 to transform, while more significant people and places necessitate level 2 or 3 to be filled before they'll spring to new life. The gauge constantly depletes, requiring you to trick and slide your way everywhere to maintain the board's power, giving the game a low-level sense of maintenance that can, as the hours pass, begin to grate.

Flow isn't the game's only innovation. Luminous green rails or ramps will grow out in front of you as you ride along them. Initially these grow along pre-set paths, but midway through the game you gain the ability to shape them in real-time as you ride them, allowing you to carve your own path through the air in order to reach high parts of the levels, or link together static objects to create continuous lines through the environment. This mechanic turns the player into an impromptu level designer.

In any skateboarding game, exhilaration comes from creating an unbroken chain of movement through the world, moving from park bench to railing to curb in a seamless string of grinds and transfers. Maximize the opportunities for a player to chain tricks through your game's environments and their enjoyment increases in kind.

The Tony Hawk series' approach was to facilitate improbably huge lines of unbroken passage through its world, allowing its player to link together hundreds of metres of scenery in one elegant, kinetic chain. Skate, by contrast, allows only more modest flow, but heightened the sense of reward through increased difficulty.

Shaun White Skateboarding occupies a fascinating sort of middle ground with its extendible rails. It gives you limited power to manipulate the world in intriguing ways, and in a manner far more intuitive and playful than a dry level editor. This – combined with the game's extremely forgiving links and transfers that will right your deck if it's incorrectly angled when landing a jump, only forcing your character into a bail in the most extreme of circumstances – facilitates long, satisfying chains. It's exhilarating.

Nevertheless, there are problems amongst all this riotous invention. The game world is sectioned off, with long load times between each area. These especially irritate during set-pieces – such as one stand-out moment in which you flee a government helicopter by grinding along railway lines – where failure not only drains your gauge immediately, but also requires a load before the retry, breaking game flow in more than one way.

Midway into the game, the business of urban renewal takes a back seat to the introduction of malleable ramps and rails, thereby lessening the effect and coherence of both. Is this a game about renovating the city for others or remodelling it for the benefit of a single skateboarder who wants to reach a collectible on the fourth floor of an apartment block? Moments when play switches to Shaun White as he skates for the benefit of watching men in white coats, presumably inserted to justify the license, are incongruous, as are the hacking mini-games in which you guide a ball bearing through a computer terminal.

The result is a game that fails to be more than the sum of its parts. The creativity and daring invention of the designers should be applauded in no uncertain terms. But by the end of the game, it's clear that the studio was unable to bring its patchwork quilt of mechanics together into a coherent whole. What remains, though, is a fascinating, idiosyncratic skateboarding game that brings fun and colour back to a weary genre – even if it fails to change its direction.