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Stunt games such as these are always a bit of a challenge to review since I think expectations of how they should play will vary greatly from person to person. At the top of the food chain you have games like the Tony Hawk series that pretty well defined the genre, depending on your taste you’d have the Trials series off to the side which emphasizes technique, but then with just about everything else it’s a bit of a crap shoot. Tricky lives up to its name at least, putting an emphasis on providing you the opportunity to chain together what ultimately becomes a pretty impressive number of generally satisfying moves. Depending on the course you’re on the general goal and side objectives will vary (and these side objectives are a nice distraction, to be clear) but on a broad level in some cases your goal with be to quickly complete the course, and the rest of the time there’ll be a trick emphasis, whether more guided or freestyle in nature. While I appreciate that a problem I sometimes hit, where a course will be set up in a way that makes you stumble on technique and bring the fun down with a degree of pickiness, the general low-gravity and “floaty” feel of the game brings its own frustrations. There’s just a certain lack of crispness in how your moves and button pressed map to the action on the screen and trying to chain together moves can get visually muddy at times but worse the controls can feel that way as well. If you’re just looking for a budget stunt-focused game it may satisfy, just keep your expectations a bit grounded.
Justin Nation, Score:Fair [6.7]