Wakeboarding HD (PS3)
Wakeboarding. Existing somewhere between “surfing in miniature” and “skateboarding on water”, this water sport never really gets the same degree of recognition as other extreme sports. It tends to follow similar formulas to the bigger ones in that it’s performative rather than focused on scoring, but its design makes it an odd fit for a video game. The entire sport is about riding behind a specially designed boat so you can do small jumps off its wake and perform tricks. This could very quickly grow old, so Wakeboarding HD quite wisely turned it up a notch, the sport no longer just about aerial tricks as the wakeboarder can now smash through rooftops, dodge hungry sharks, and even detonate huge swathes of aquatic mines.
Wakeboarding HD takes place across 20 levels, all of them linear challenge courses to play into the inevitable design imposed by the sport’s very nature. As the boat pulling your wakeboarder along drives through special paths filled with ramps to leap off of, objects to smash through, rails to grind on, and hazards to avoid, the player is asked to complete certain level specific goals in order to unlock new stages or souvenir collectibles. Each level has one major goal that you need to clear with at least a bronze rating to proceed, these goals playing into different parts of how your wakeboarder can interact with the level or integrating the regular rules of the extreme water sport.
Controlling your wakeboarder is fairly simple even if it has a few odd choices you’ll need to get used to. Interacting with the boat’s wake is at least easy and intuitive, the player able to move up onto it like a small aquatic halfpipe and leap off the top for a small bit of air you can work simple tricks into. There is a point system to encourage the player to do as many special tricks as possible, a combo building up so long as you don’t go too long without adding to it. Other actions like breaking through objects in the water or on piers will build it up as well, as does collecting the stars that are dotted around special levels to usually serve as their own goal. The wake always allows you to at least get some amount of air, meaning if there is a rail you want to grind on or a surface outside of the water you want to briefly leap up onto, you have a small ramp of water to get you there. Grinding balance is pretty easy to handle as well, and since the forward movement is handled by the game you only need to concern yourself with the balance meter to stay on a rail.
If you do spot a large ramp that will give you some insane air, you do run into one of the first control quirks. Depending on whether you hold X, Square, Circle, or Triangle, your initial jump will come with different initial tricks and you are able to add midair maneuvers as well so you can mix together flips and board tricks for more points. This almost works just fine, but holding down a jump button helps a lot with regular wakeboard maneuvering, especially since a quick hop can get you out of trouble at times. This means almost as soon as you hit the water you want to be holding down a jump button, but doing so while in the air will cause your rider to hold onto the wakeboard and eventually crash into the water instead of land safely. Determining if a landing will be safe can be a little unreliable as well since the game handles how your wakeboarder levels out, meaning in some stages you might just want to avoid the risk of satisfying enormous jumps or risky maneuvers like hopping across rooftops since you can’t 100% guarantee a safe landing with your own controls.
The oddities in jumping are a rare but present issue or simply require adjusting your mindset, but one last aspect of the midair maneuvering definitely feels a little strange. Your wakeboarder can only move so far to the left or right of the wake naturally before you need to hold down a button to do a hard drift out into farther waters. This ability can actually work while maneuvering in the air as well despite not making sense logically. You are mostly still beholden to the momentum of your jump, but it can be vital to completing certain level goals so it’s odd the game does little to communicate its importance.
Luckily, most of the other aspects of Wakeboarding HD are put together well enough that it manages to keep its central sport fairly fresh throughout the adventure. A more extreme level might be mostly devoted to dodging sharks, weaving through a minefield, spending as much time out of the water as possible, or smashing apart everything you can, but the normal levels still manage to entertain for their short run times as they add twists to less over the top tasks like getting a high score or combo. You might have already done a stage where you weave through gates like slalom on water early on, but when the concept returns later on the boat in front starts to reach dangerous speeds where a little mistake can lead to a chain of misses that will remove any chance of beating that level. There are special items called Gifts too, these smiley face medallions appearing if you’re racking up points and combos in any mission that can influence the level goal like giving you free collectibles in a collection focused mission or removing mistakes from your record. On top of this, retrying a level is practically immediate, so even the harder stages are able to put up a good fight without getting frustrating.
While each level has a main goal you must at least do sort of well at, stages also include two secondary goals each. These are all cut from a similar cloth with concepts like not falling off your board, grabbing the stars around the level, or keeping an active combo going throughout the run, but while stages are designed around their most important goal first and foremost, the additional goals often influence the design and you can quite easily spot the intended paths for achieving all three of your objectives. Executing them all and earning high marks for it isn’t that easy though, but the fact your goals can so smoothly link together makes it easy to try and attempt them all or even justify a reset since you know you could hit that optional objective properly on the next attempt. Having them be optional though gives you that freedom to scrape by in the game’s harder levels without having to balance so many goals, but Wakeboarding HD definitely tries to get the most out of its set of 20 well built levels.
As you would hope for in a game that puts HD in its title, Wakeboarding HD’s high definition graphics are definitely impressive. Sure, the three selectable wakeboarders all look a little funky when the camera comes in close, but the water looks lovely as it reacts to the wake boat and other factors realistically. Nearby islands, docks, boats, and other set decoration also do a lot to set up a nice summer water sport atmosphere, and with the time of day changing, you can have both brightly lit noontime action or moodier sunset challenges. However, perhaps the HD came with a price, as the splitscreen multiplayer definitely suffers some tangible slowdown to try and keep both players moving without sacrificing that fidelity.
THE VERDICT: Wakeboarding HD takes its simple water sports and pumps it up to something a bit more exciting with its over the top goals and diverse range of level objectives. The high definition graphics do a good job of adding an appealing summer atmosphere to the tightly designed courses, the small set of levels able to achieve some longevity with their selection of complementary challenges. However, some of the basics do hold back the high octane sports action, jumps in particular a batch of strange controls and multiplayer play surprisingly choppy.
And so, I give Wakeboarding HD for PlayStation 3…
An OKAY rating. While wakeboarding was definitely given a beneficial injection of energy and play diversity through Wakeboarding HD’s objective structure, those solid course designs don’t have the gameplay fundamentals to guarantee you’ll enjoy going for all three level missions or angling for the gold crown in the main task. Jumping is a strange of mix what you control and how you control it, and even acclimating to it doesn’t change certain factors like how the game is in charge of evening you out after a large jump and doesn’t always do so reliably. There’s definitely still a good amount to enjoy in Wakeboarding HD, and if you can accept that sometimes you’ll need to get back on your board after a wipeout or click the surprisingly quick restart option a few times, going for the goals can be an exciting test of your reaction times and course knowledge. The level count was likely kept low to prevent too much conceptual overlap and that helps the game maintain its constant sense of novelty, the injections of extreme ideas like wakeboarding through an active minefield peppering in some bombastic and memorable moments between the ones that focus on more specific mechanics.
There aren’t many video games based on wakeboarding, but Wakeboarding HD still does a decent job bringing the sport to life with both many of its real world elements and some over the top video game ideas to spice it up for people looking more for arcade action rather than a realistic sim. The fundamentals definitely need some more polish before it can hope to comfortably earn a clean recommendation for fans of this niche sport or players just looking for a unique arcade-like action challenge, but if you accept that riding the wake isn’t always going to be smooth, Wakeboarding HD’s nicely built stages definitely have the potential to provide some wet and wild wakeboarding fun.