Note to videogame developers: when you’ve set an incredibly difficult challenge in your game (that veers dangerously close to violating what 3D Realms’ Scott Miller calls ‘The God Concept,’), and your players are failing time and again at said challenge, please don’t tell them that ‘they suck.’

Not only is it demoralising, and leads to increasing amounts of frustration, but it can also open your game up to vitriolic backlash. That’s not going to happen here, but that’s just a helpful hint, from me to you.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about TikGames and Creat Studios’ water sport-themed downloadable PlayStation 3 game, Wakeboarding HD.

Wakeboarding HD is based on that peculiar water sport where participants strap into a special board, and cling on to a tether for dear life as they’re dragged along by a motorboat of some description, left to survive the wake left in the water by said motorboat.

Occasionally, these participants perform a variety of gob-stopping tricks, either using the natural ramp formed by the wake’s wave as a launch point, or by using man-made ramps and rails built into a watercourse, both requiring extreme speed to pull off effectively.

These participants, for sure, are very crazy.

Luckily, Wakeboarding HD allows us to perform these tricks and experience a slice of the sport with but a plastic controller at hand – with an overall easy to use control scheme, you’ll be pulling off all kinds of aerial manoeuvres in no time, flipping, rolling and spinning every which way in an attempt to wrack up more points for successfully landing impressive tricks.

Those selfsame ‘man-made’ ramps and rails from real-life watercourses also make an appearance in Wakeboarding HD, adding a nice extra layer of variety and complexity to your amazing feats, although balancing after jumping up onto a rail can take some getting used to.

Wakeboarding HD is made up of a series of around twenty challenges spread out across a map, set in specific watercourses. Once you complete one challenge, two more open up for you to tackle until you’ve completed them all. While the simple act of performing stunts for points is fun in and of itself, during these challenges you’ll be tasked with objectives such as collecting a certain number of stars, passing through a set number of gates, surviving shark attacks and evading exploding mines.

Simply completing the challenge isn’t quite enough, however, as there are secondary objectives that you’re able to meet during a course as well, which, in theory, will add to the replayability of the game, while a two-player split-screen mode is also available to go boarding with a mate.

The thing with Wakeboarding HD is that, once you’ve seen most of what the game has to offer, there isn’t really a whole lot to hold your interest other than the challenge of completing another course and meeting set objectives, and with challenges that lack variety and become punishingly difficult towards the latter stages, the fun sinks fast.

Sure, as mentioned the act of performing tricks is fun, but when you’re being dragged around on a linear course with objectives to fulfil in order to unlock new challenges, there’s not much room for ‘fun,’ freeform stunts of your own.

Wakeboarding HD could almost be compared to a skating game like Tony Hawk where you’re given objectives to complete, but at the same time, you’re also free to simply skate around an ‘open’ world and try to pull off crazy stunts wherever you please. That freedom is sorely lacking in Wakeboarding HD, and it’s unfortunately as a result of the nature of the sport itself.

At $15 on the PlayStation Store, Wakeboarding HD is also pretty expensive when you consider that, despite the impressive graphics and high production values, there isn’t really all that much content – if you’re able to keep your ‘Rage ‘O Meter’ down throughout proceedings, all of the courses can be unlocked in an afternoon.

Wakeboarding HD is a fun game for the first hour of play (minus the confusing tutorial levels), but rapidly degrades into a linear unlock-a-thon where the only thing keeping you progressing is the prospect of gaining access to new courses, so you can simply gain access to newer courses, to gain access to courses that are newer still, which are all unveiled in a slightly rigid manner, forcing you to complete a very limited set of challenges before moving on to the next set.

The high price point doesn’t help either, and could be more readily recommended at a sub-$10 level, especially if you intend playing in two-player split-screen mode, and if unlocking things for the sake of unlocking them is your bag.

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