Overview

The adventure begins with our rider's creation: choice of sex, face type, clothes, body type, hair, board, and even style (cool or showy). If the selection of clothes is quite limited when you start, you should know that many outfits will fill your wardrobe as you win challenges, from a simple tank top to a ridiculous pink rabbit suit.

After an ultra-fashionable cinematic, MTV style, with beautiful crazy drawings, a crazy aunt's voice, and some pee-pee gags worthy of the last episode of South Park, we think that Amped has changed! And not necessarily in a good way. This humor, as crazy as it may be, will follow you throughout the adventure through many offbeat videos. Puppets, drawings, collages, manga: everything is good to try to give an identity to the game desperately. And if it's sure that MTV fans will be able to find their way around without too much difficulty, it's equally certain that such an orientation won't suit everyone. To top it all off, the jokes dropped throughout the adventure with accents so bad that one can imagine a Thai pig ruminating on something vaguely Portuguese seem to have been recorded after absorbing hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Gameplay

Unfortunately, it's not just the spirit that has changed: the gameplay, too, has undergone some radical changes. It's done with the beautiful and dashing Amped, terribly realistic and hardcore. Now it's time for a mainstream game, played the way SSX is played. If almost all the jumps and moves have been preserved, it's quite sad to find yourself facing a game that allows you to chain half a dozen positions in a row in flight. Fans may quickly lose their way, to the point that one comes to wonder why you named this game Amped 3.

However, if the gameplay is arcade-style, the game is not fast: being a beginner in the field, you will soon notice that your character is hopelessly slow. So much so that you'll have to stop crouch down to gain a semblance of speed, which is not a real treat in an arcade game!

But for all its flaws, Amped 3 is still fun to play. With its simplistic gameplay, it will delight beginners who will play it without ever taking their heads off. Moreover, the difficulty seems to have been thought out accordingly since 80% of the game can be played in one go without ever having to start again. The end is perhaps a little more difficult but far from being infeasible! The single-player mode is 10 hours at most, which is rather a pity when you know that its predecessor was much longer and more fun.

Graphics

On the original Xbox, the Amped series convinced us. The first episode already revealed a sublime graphics engine, which had been improved with the release of the Amped 2. Amped 3 offers the luxury of a new engine that only slightly improves the previous one. If the display distance is mind-boggling, we can only deplore the characters' rather sketchy models and game areas, hardly worthy of the Xbox 360. The transition to the Xbox 360 is almost unnoticeable, and fans may be quite disappointed. It's all about MTV-like cinematics, manga-like special effects, and big fluorescent markers telling you what you want to achieve. When it comes to bad taste, you can hardly do worse.

Sound

As for the soundtrack, on the other hand, there is nothing to say: the music is numerous, and above all, very varied (tango, rock, metal, RnB, rap, etc.).

Conclusion

If Amped 3 were released on the original Xbox, it would certainly have been a great game. With graphics that don't exploit the console's capabilities, daisy-chained humor, and gameplay that has been completely redesigned to leave a bitter taste and a feeling of not enough, this third game in the series is a disappointment. Although it looks nice at first glance thanks to a few innovations (sledding, snowmobiling, dumb cinematics, etc.), Amped 3 is quick to show its true face and, honestly, we would have preferred it to remain like the previous two versions!