Snowboarding has returned to the console. Maybe it should have waited a little longer.

After many long awaited years, snowboarding has once again returned to a console near you. Ubisoft has teamed up with Olympic medalist Shaun White to bring us a fresh romp in the snow across mountain peaks and valleys in Europe, Japan and Alaska. I was hoping that Shaun White Snowboarding (SWS) would deliver a fresh and exciting snow boarding experience. Unfortunately, what I received was a game that is mediocre at best and controller smashing at worst.

You play as yourself under Shaun White's proverbial wing. He tasks you with finding 12 coins scattered across the four playable mountains with three to a mountain. Once you collect all 12 coins, Shaun explains how to use a focus power and sets you on a task to find another 12 coins. The new focus power is required to retrieve this next set of 12 coins. There are three powers in all, and they get more ridiculous as you go along; so by the end you are basically a snowboarding superhero. Not that I am complaining about getting the focus powers, without the quests to retrieve them there wouldn't really be a story not to mention the focus powers can make the game more enjoyable to play. The problem is that the coins are put in the most precarious spots and often require the player to walk all over the mountain, NOT snowboard, to find them. In addition, these focus powers are not available for use in the challenges. Why force the player to get the focus powers and not allow them in the challenges? I understand not allowing them during the challenges that are played against other players online; but in single player mode they should be permitted.

Finding coins wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't a requirement. Instead the player is forced to find every single coin to progress through the game. There are many little challenges scattered throughout the mountains to occupy your time, but they are just there to provide the player with money to purchase new, completely unnecessary, equipment. The funny thing is that I would expect the reverse to be true, the challenges would be required and the coins would just be a bonus to gain skills to help in the challenges. This would not work of course since the focus powers are not usable in the challenges.

SWS provides a nice interface that allows the player to control the music that is being played. In the beginning I enjoyed flipping around in the song list but I had to shut the music off after just a few days of playing to save my sanity. The songs themselves are not bad, as a matter of fact I think many of them are good, but there are only about a dozen or so songs. Therefore, they end up being repeated so often that it becomes very distracting and irritating.

Since SWS is based on the same engine as Assassin's Creed, there is even a playable loading screen similar to Assassin's Creed, the graphics are good for the most part. However, there are a number of glitches that could be a little distracting if you care about that kind of thing. Just to give you an idea of what I am talking about, I was able to see through a large crack at the bottom of a hill and see the terrain further down the slope. Beyond the graphics there were several other glitches that I saw, like falling into a fissure caused my player to freefall for about two minutes before finally dying, but they are not serious enough to interfere with gameplay.

Unlike many similar games, SWS does not have button combinations that control the moves that you perform (e.g. Y + Down is a back flip). Instead you move the left and right analog sticks in various directions at the moment you lift off the ground with the directions pressed dictating the move performed. This aspect of the game works well for the most part. However, the controls can get a little dicey when jumping onto rails or trees and most frustrating is when trying to stop. Pushing in the opposite direction as your player is heading makes him/her stop. Unfortunately this usually doesn't work, so I am forced to use the checkpoint interface to save my place before I slip off a ledge or go out of control passed a turn I needed to make.

Check pointing works by pressing down on the control pad and pressing the X button to mark a spot. This means removing your thumb off of the controls stick so your player is basically out of control while marking a spot. You then press down on the control pad and the B button to warp back to the marked spot. The checkpoint interface makes searching for the coins much less time consuming if you use it correctly. I say correctly because you can only place a single checkpoint down at a time so make sure you really want to override a checkpoint before placing another one.

I believe that SWS's saving grace is the online play. You can meet up with friends and just shred the mountain at your leisure. No need to stay on the specified paths, just go down the mountain in almost any direction. Have a race to see who can get to the bottom the fastest, compete against other players in one of the challenges or see who can pull off the highest rated run. The game even allows you to save, replay and edit videos of your moves so you can upload them online to share.

To me the best part of SWS has to be how relaxing it is to just go to the highest point of the mountain and snowboard to the bottom. No challenges, no coin retrieval, just the sound of the snow crunching beneath your board and the wind sailing past your virtual head. A run like this can easily take ten minutes and can be very relaxing.

The, at certain times, poor controls and glitchy graphics I can live with and are a small detraction from the game and its score. The storyline however I cannot live with. It makes no sense and I believe making the player walk all over four mountains looking for coins is completely ridiculous.

The bottom line is that I would suggest you pass on this game unless you are the type of player that doesn't care about the storyline or you just can't wait for a few more years to pass for another snowboarding game to come out. By the way, if you are going to buy this game, make sure that you pick it up at Target as you get a lot of extra goodies including another entire mountain to play on.