Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Downhill Domination

Written by Tony Kennetz on August 13, 2003

Full Review: This sport may have never been done on the PS2 before, but most of Downhill Domination feels like it has.

Downhill mountain bike racing certainly seems like the high point of extreme sports. While it may not match others in terms of recognition and glamour, ask anyone who has seen it on TV or in person, the sense of excitement never leaves the air. It is only natural that something of this nature would get its own game in a market where skateboarding has a million and one games and every other sport is getting some sort of facelift to become more УedgyФ and Уout there.Ф The problem lies in the fact that despite this sport's high adrenalin mood, atmosphere and all around aura, Downhill Domination is still missing something, even though the puzzle does for the most part appear complete.

Domination really doesn't skimp on much, as there are plenty of careers and courses (27 to be exact, placed all around the world) primed to be ripped to shreds by the racers behind the control pads. The career mode is the meat of this game, and it shows in the number of races to be run inside. There are several different career paths to be run, including the biggest, УSuperФ Career, which fuses all the best ideas from the others into one long circuit, where you'll have to be good at just about everything to come out of it with anything.

The problem with all that is that it makes all the other Specialized paths seem like rehashed tack ons, placed there simply to bulk up the features list. This may not bother a lot of you, who will undeniably love a certain type of race and simply crave more without having to deal with the УriffraffФ in between, but for the rest of us, there's nothing to be obscenely giddy about except running the larger path again with another racer. The good news is that outside of the career modes there are plenty of other ways to run, including training, arcade, time trials and among others, mutliplayer. Not enough can be said about the excitement of rushing down a mountain to defeat anywhere from one-to-three of your friends. My only complaint? There is no online component. I demand to be told when that feature got lost in the shuffle, because it would have fit perfectly within the game structure.

After you've hit the course, you'll get to see where Downhill Domination really gets a chance to shine with some seriously solid gameplay. The basic controls are all absolutely spot on, which in terms of importance is like securing the President after hearing a shot fired from a large crowd. Need to bank right to avoid a head on collision with a deer? Make your move quickly and everything will be alright, but I'll tell you all now that even with controls this close to perfection, you're going to wipe out and believe me when I tell you that it has nothing to do with the gameplay, in this game those faults always lie with the player.

You'll have to bail because this game makes УspeedФ look about thirteen letters to short. The gameplay here moves at such a fast rate that if you blink, you really will miss something and end up flat on your back in one really, really deep hole. That or you'll run your face straight into a rock. At any rate, you're going to be booking down the tracks and playing the game, you're going to feel it. To put it best, let's just say that before I played this game I thought it would be pretty darn cool to this for real at some point in my life. Now that I have given this one a go, no matter how much fun I have in the safety of my home will I ever go out on a mountain with the intention of blazing down it on my bike. Ever. Looking at this aspect, DD really is that impressive.

Littered throughout all the courses are power-ups, which despite having become the norm in most games of this genre, have something of a different effect here. Most specifically would be the combat pickups, which upgrade your fighting skills starting at the measly punch and ending at the ultra powerful..water bottle. Yeah, a water bottle. You know, I like the fact that Incog stuck to stuff you'd find on a bike racing course, but the idea of chucking a water bottle at the opposition is obsoletely idiotic. Of course, watching those same opponents fly through the air after being hit, that's pretty funny. Overall, after getting used to some of the strange ideas used in the game's УfightingФ system, beating the stuffing out of the enemy is a rock solid experience.

The other way to go about getting better weapons is to nail the big tricks, which is another staple of the extreme sports phenomenon. Everything found here is pretty elementary, most of it having already been done by EA with their SSX snowboarding series. Using the shoulder buttons and the Triangle to modify, riders pull of big tricks and score points. Freestyle flips can also be performed by holding up or down on the analog stick before entering/in the air. There are big rewards for pulling off giant tricks, but also the ever present risk of serious injury. Which means not only losing your power-ups, but possibly losing your place among the other riders as well.

That said, you will lose your place to other riders. A lot. It cannot be said why this is, but it seems that no matter how far you'd think you got ahead of the others, make one mistake and all of a sudden, there they are. The only way to avoid this is essentially to see and take every shortcut on a course, and then you'll finally have some breathing room. This makes for an exciting mood, but I can't help but wonder why all the other bikers become super heroes as soon as I fall of my bike.

Shortcuts are the key to winning, and they are aplenty in Domination. Almost everything is fair game, from jumping off the track and onto a platform twenty feet away to cutting straight through highly wooded areas (that are certainly tick infested, check your body after shortcut use). Unlike a lot of extreme sports games that utilize racing elements, the shortcuts can be extremely difficult to drive through with the speed the game uses. Coming out of the woods unscathed could very well be pure dumb luck, but that's probably the way it would be in real life too. Taking risks is a focal point of both a winning strategy and having a good time, just like a visit to a casino, so this is okay with me.

To get superficial, Downhill Domination isn't exactly what you'd call a visual knockout. The environments tend to be very well on the bland side, which is a disappointment when you look at all the exciting backdrops SSX had for its extreme action. This also goes for most of the riders on the course, as many of them appear to be the same aside from different color and sponsor variation on the uniforms. But none of that will matter when you're rushing downhill to the finish line at sixty frames per second with zero slow down. If that's the price I have to pay for the speed, take the fancy graphics and give the smoothness, although it would be nice if both could somehow form a cohesive package.

The audio is really the weakest point of the entire game, with some rather low-key sound effects and music. Downhill Domination is one of those PS2 games that makes you wish you could build your own soundtrack via a hard drive like the Xbox's. The effects are fairly to played down, leaving it up to the visual of ramming into a tree to give the total effect, which just isn't possible, most of us need to hear the УBAMФ sound to really get the entire picture (although, seeing the biker hit the tree, pretty jarring.) At least there are some pretty good voice over quips in the middle of the gameplay.

The entire checklist of extras you'd expect to see is here, including extra bikes, sponsors and parts. It's pretty fun to pick up new parts for your already souped up bike, and riding with the Mountain Dew logo on your back really does feel like an accomplishment. There are also a load of random bits a pieces to pick up, including a sheep that you can ride for fifty thousand dollars. Yeah, a sheep. Normally I'd dismiss this as a silly gimmick because that's what it is, but I had a blast with it. That thing can really move. Unfortunately, once everything's unlocked, the fun and games are over. Unless you're able to pull together four friends frequently (which I strong suggest you do for this game), DD may spend much of its life in your home on the shelf.