Snowboard Kids 2

Snowboard Kids 2 review by metalfighterriku

Overall score:
7.5 out of 10

Overview:

Snowboard Kids 2 is a fun party racing, mario-kart-style game, with a cute story mode and tons of cool options like unlockable boards, costumes, and characters.

The storyline for SBK2 is simple: Some stupid bratty green demon kid named Damien is wrecking havoc around Snow Town, and it’s up to a bunch of snowboarding 10-year olds to stop him!

SBK2 hosts the same cast of characters as the original, such as Slash, Jam, Linda, Tommy, and Nancy, but also adds a few new characters like Wendy and Damien. Each character has different attributes: speed, trick, and all-around, giving them advantages or disadvantages in certain courses and even boss stages.

The game consists of racing through 12 crazy courses, taking snowboarding off the slopes and into jungles, houses, and even outer space! In story mode, you occasionally run into a boss stage, where you race against or battle a boss character to keep it from reaching the finish line.

There’s also a variety of cool items, power-ups and weapons to use throughout the courses. There’s fan propeller that speeds you up, and a rocket that shoots you super fast for a short period of time. Some weapons send your opponent tumbling over, like the bomb and the glove, while others can immobilize your opponent for a few seconds, like the frying pan that flatens everyone and the parachute bomb that suspends a character in midair.

In order to use weapons and items you need money to purchase them. You can get money by collecting coins that are scattered around the course or by doing tricks. There’s also an item you can use to steal money from your opponents, but can be really annoying when used against you.

The story mode let’s you walk around Snow Town, which is basically a small strip of random buildings. There’s a board shop where you can purchase new boards using the money you acquire from racing the course. There’s also a schoolhouse, where you can change your character, an internet cafe, where you can view all the characters, course, boards, and songs you’ve unlocked, and there’s even a paint shop, where you can change the design on your board.

Snowboard Kids 2 is available for N64 or its emulators.

Fun Factor:

Its super cuteness, bright colorful cute big-nosed characters, and simple cartoon-style party racing gameplay is what makes this game fun to play!

Difficulty:

The game is simple but can be quite challenging when a massacre of items and weapons are being used against you. The boss fights in story mode can be difficult and sometimes annoying, especially when they scatter debris for you to trip over. Some characters use special boards in certain stages, making it difficult to pas them without the aid of a special board. After beating story mode, it gives you the option to play it on expert. I found the dinosaur in Crazy Jungle to be extremely difficult in normal mode, even with the dragon board, so I imagine on expert it is probably impossible.

Replayability:

Very high. I played this game over countless times because its a simple racing game with not much thinking to it.

Music:

8 out of 10. One of the things I love about SBK2 is the music. All of the course tracks are catchy and fun to listen to. Some of my favorites are Jingle Town, Linda’s Castle, and Turtle Island. There’s even a channel in Wendy’s Internet Cafe, in story mode, that let’s you listen to all these wonderful tracks!

Graphics:

7 out of 10.  For its time, SBK2 had awesome graphics. The characters were a bit polygonal but cute, smooth, and colorful. The background enviroments looked flat, but everything else was nicely done like the buildings and the water. One stage had flying fish and there was even a stage where you snowboard on a giant piano that made sounds when you jumped on it. Really cool!

Control:

The controls were very easy to understand. You start off a bit slow but then pick it up quickly. Speed characters are more difficult to maneuver than trick and all-around type characters. Doing tricks was also very easy to do, depending on which direction you have the joystick when holding down and letting go of the A-button lets you do different tricks.

Conclusion:

If you’re into racing games like Mario-Kart and Diddy Kong Racing and aren’t really big on graphics, but love cute looking characters in cartoony environments, then you should check this game out!

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