captaind's Full Review: Surf's Up for Nintendo Wii
Surf's Up is a WII game based on the animated film of the same name. It's a decent game and a pretty good interpretation of the movie, which features surf-boarding penguins. The whole game is based around surf-boarding, though there is also one bonus game where you have to slide down a track on a leaf.
There are several characters to choose from - Cody, Big Z, Chicken Joe, etc - all the main characters from the film, in fact. Each surfer has his own range of abilities including speed and freestyle ability, and there are a selection of boards which also add to or detract from your different abilities. As you progress through the game there are lots of unlockables, mainly in the form of new characters and boards. You can also gain new songs to add to your tracklist, and the soundtrack is nice. I never felt it quite took off, but the songs were good and appropriate to the surfing theme. The sound effects were fine too, with lots of samples from the movie. They did get a little repetitive after a while however. The graphics are also pretty good, with solid representations of the characters, good backgrounds and some nice environmental effects. The different locations are quite nicely rendered and, within the limits of the game (after all, sea and surf are going to look much the same in every location) there is a decent amount of variety. There are a large variety of areas to surf in, which you gain access to as you complete challenges.
After the tutorial levels which are (mostly) helpful, you can start on the championship mode. There are only a couple of available courses open at the start, and you get more as you successfully complete one of the three main objectives for each course - two are reaching a particular score (one challenging, the other seemingly impossible!), and one is making it through all of the gates (which is easy in the first few levels but gets quite tricky later on. You score points by doing tricks - the harder the trick, the higher the reward in points. There is also a special "stoke mode" that you can get if you top your energy bar up to the top, enabling much tougher and higher scoring tricks to be performed. One snag is that tricks have to be successfully completed before you get the points - if you crash even close to completing a trick, you get zilch.
Other features of the film such as riding the "tube" and video clips giving commentary on the surfing tournament. The video clips are frequently amusing, if not laugh-out-loud funny. It doesn't take the form of retelling the story of the movie, it's just a straight surfing game. In many ways it succeeds in being a good one and the game makes reasonable use of the WII controllers (Wiimote and nunchuck used together) - but unfortunately the way the game responds to your commands is much too inconsistent. Thing will work at times and not at others, with no discernible reason as to why. The main problem with the game is that it just isn't all that much fun - and a surfing game, you would think, has a lot of potential to be fun. This problem continues with the multiplayer mode - only up to 2-player - which isn't as much fun as you would think.
Final Verdict
Surf's Up has quite a few good things to recommend it, but the inconsistent controls kind of kill off any chance of it being a really great game. Overall it's enjoyable for a while, but it's definitely more a rental (or second hand if you can find it very cheap) game than one worth buying. Definitely worth a shot if you like surfing and / or the movie, but don't expect it to keep you entertained for a particularly long time.
Surf s Up is an exciting arcade surfing and extreme sports video game. The action is set at the annual "Reggie Belafonte Big Z Memorial Surf Off," whe...More at eBay
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