Full Review

10 November 2003 - Following in the footsteps of Tony Hawk and Dave Mirra, Shaun Murray, Wakeboarder extraordinaire has come to the X-Box to show us what wakeboarding is all about.

After you’ve made it past the standard video intro footage of crazy people doing crazy things, you are presented with three main choices in the single player mode - Career, free rider or free drive.

The career mode as you can imagine is based around you completing a number of set tasks and takes on the same gaming style as the Tony Hawk series. Before you start tackling tasks and challenges you have to complete a rather annoying tutorial first and while this does make sure you can get the most out of the game, getting stuck on this and not being able to get any further can be frustrating. Each level has a set amount of tasks to complete. Solving them rewards you with better stats for your boarder such as the ability to get higher air and speed. Complete enough tasks and challenges and you can change the map.

Free rider mode allows you to practice your wake skills and is a good option if you can’t be bothered to complete for the challenges or simply want a break to hone specific skills.

Free drive mode is a chance for you to get in the boat and again a chance for you to practice and hone your boat driving skills - with no tricks available this does get rather dull rather quickly.

For those who want to play against a friend, Wakeboarding Unleashed supports only two players, spilt-screen.

VERDICT
For the Tony Hawk generation this is more of the same, but just with water instead of a skate park. It's fun, mindless and great for killing half an hour. The only major downside is the amount of challenges you need to complete before you open up the next course. While this does offer greater longevity to the game, it can make the game dull as you spend hours completing all the different tasks before a change of scenery.