Extreme sports games certainly have carved out a nice little niche for themselves in the gaming world. It goes without saying that the Tony Hawk series is most responsible for the explosion, virtually re-inventing the genre with a game that got everyone into grinding and pulling 900's. I am not really a stranger to the genre, hell, I've been playing skating games since Skate or Die on the Commodore 64. The genre has definitely improved over the years, thankfully.

Within the extreme sports genre, the Tony Hawk series is obviously what most every other game will be compared to. Aggressive Inline, coded by Z-Axis is easily akin to the Tony Hawk style of game. At a glance, it could be seen as a knock off game due to the many similarities. You have the music selection of punk, alternative pop, and hip hop, the menu screens kind of similar and even the control scheme is similar which will make everyone feel right at home. My only fear is that people will overlook this title because of those similarities, dismissing Aggressive Inline as just a "me too" Tony Hawk wannabe.

Z-Axis has a veritable cornucopia of things to be proud of in this collection of code. The game really could have done a lot less and been perfectly passable, and even very playable. However, they really tried to go the extra mile, not only in tweaking the previously established gameplay mechanics in similar titles, but also in adding features that will most likely find homes in future titles in the genre.

How about we knock out the easy topics first? I guess we will start on the graphical experience of the title. Aggressive Inline, while it won't win any awards in the area, really didn't slouch in terms of the in-game graphics. Character models are very well done, with nice visual touches such as clothing animation and other little details. The characters themselves look very passable, but we have seen way better from other games. This is not a bad thing since I seriously doubt anyone will be complaining about the way characters look. It seems that Z-Axis struck a nice balance between polygon count and texturing effects to make the characters look the best at the speeds they wanted the game to perform at, and perform this title does!

Aggressive Inline sports a blistering framerate on the Cube, which is nice to know that they didn't just slack when they ported the PS2 code over. Z-Axis managed to keep this title chugging along at a steady 60 fps while throwing expansive, living levels at the gamer. The load times aren't bad except for when you are saving to the memory card, but I will talk about that later.

The levels in Aggressive Inline are just staggering. They are simply HUGE! Not only did they make insanely large levels, but they are just outright littered with life and objects to pull tricks off of. The complete scale of the levels may not be apparent at first, since they feature many sections and even whole new sections that open up when you complete certain in-game tasks. The stages have an organic feel to them. There are plenty of moving objects, people who move and talk, vehicles, etc etc. The first level alone throws a ton of different things at you. It is a bit overwhelming in the beginning, actually.

I went into this title with little preparation. I didn't read any reviews, previews or anything else. At the very beginning, I just jumped right into the game, playing it like I would Tony Hawk. I had some fun for a while but was left feeling like it wasn't all that much different from other titles in it's category. However, after a couple hours or so, I was completely hooked, and I had barely scratched the surface. When I finally decided to get down to business, I embarked on the comprehensive training mode that was graciously included by the developers of Aggressive Inline. The training mode alone was very comprehensive and helpful for people who are accustomed to the genre or a complete newbie to this type of game.

Some of the additional gameplay features that added quite a bit to the experience. For starters, Z-Axis added a couple of small moves which help expert player link even more moves together to insane points. First, is the very spiffy looking vault move, which you can trigger when you skate towards objects that are around waist high or so. The move just looks awesome and adds a nice bit of flair when you vault into a combo grind. Another visually impressive move is the ability to spin around vertical and horizontal poles. For instance, you can pull off a quick 180 turn at full speed by skating neat a lamp post and grabbing onto it. You can also grab a hold of horizontal bars to propel yourself into a combo or up to a higher level in a stage. Those two moves alone, in addition to all of the grabs, tweaks, manuals and grinds should keep newbie and expert gamers busy for weeks on end. Along with those moves, a nice bail feature exists in Aggressive Inline which allows you to save yourself from wiping out when you botch a stunt. It may sound like it makes the game overly simple, but it doesn't hurt the gameplay at all. It also takes some skill and timing to bail, so it doesn't just save you from everything.

Another feature that I was really happy with was the openness of the level objectives and lack of an overall time limit to the levels. I doubt it really would have worked in this game anyway due to the size and complexity of the stages. Instead, your "Juice" meter is the gauge you have to pay attention to. The "juice" meter is filled a little at a time as you perform tricks and stunts. It depletes as you wipe out. So, as long as you have some juice, you can continue to rack up the points in any given level. Running out of juice causes you to cough up 100,000 hard earned point if you wish to continue, since point totals are carried on every time you feel like saving the game and continuing the game at a later point. Within each level, however, are many sub missions and goals to complete, some of which have their own time limits and conditions. Not only are there a lot of these tasks to complete, but once you complete some, the level's landscape can actually change and open up even more goals.

One of the coolest features that Z-Axis included was a little option in the pause menu that would let you see your list of goals and such. Sure, this idea isn't new, but what was new and impressive, I must say, was that some of the objectives in the list had a small movie camera icon next to them. By selecting these items from the menu, you were treated to a little mini 3-D flyby of where the goal was located. This is a really welcomed feature when the levels are large enough for you to not even notice where certain landmarks may be located. This is just one of the details that completely illustrates Z-Axis' dedication to the player's gameplay experience since I can pretty much guarantee that most gamers won't even see or appreciate this feature.

The level up system is also very inventive for this genre. Basically, Z-Axis seems to have adopted an almost RPG-like system for boosting your player's stats. For instance, in Tony Hawk, you might not be able to manual all that well, which is quickly remedied by earning money in a few levels and just buying points in whatever category you chose. In Aggressive Inline, you are completely out of luck. Z-Axis created a model where you are assigned point values for your tricks and stunts, which eventually add up to increased levels in certain categories. For example. if you perform a decent grind trick, you may be earn .1 towards your grind statistic. Combo your tricks and earn greater points across multiple categories. This really almost forces you to comprehensively learn the Aggressive Inline control system and moves. It may be daunting for newer players or those who kind of just squeaked by the Tony Hawk series without learning the gameplay nuances, but I felt it really added a lot of depth to this title, and I'm sure we will see this system in a lot of future games.

The characters features in Aggressive Inline are real people, for the most part. There are a couple of made up characters, such as the Britney Spears inspired poster girl, Chirssy, in addition to the off the wall hidden characters. The rest are pro inline trick skaters that you will often see on ESPN2. The character models, as I said before, aren't awe inspiring, but seem to hit a nice balance, in addition to having flowing clothes and other nice visual touches. The only that most people will miss is the ability to create your own character. Sadly, no such feature exists in Aggressive Inline and I know some people will miss that. Z-Axis did include a level editor, but, like most level editors, you won't be able to do anything amazing like the in-game levels. It is definitely adequate though.

The sound and music in Aggressive Inline is pretty standard for the genre. Lots of licenced music, scratching in-game sound effects, grinds etc etc. One nice thing is their attention to detail with the voices that are featured in the game with some of the background characters. A lot of funny little quips can be heard as you speed past the semi-interactive characters, especially the ones who will dole out objectives to you. Most of the voices are going for the over the top goofiness which really works well for this game. The rest of everything is just average, the sound in this game isn't going to blow you away, and it all gets the job done nicely. There just isn't too much that stands out.

One serious complaint of the disc is the fact that the game save file is 57 blocks. That's right, if you only have the standard memory card, you use up just about the whole thing. Not only is this annoying for people who don't like to have a lot of memory cards, but it also means that it takes a lot of time to save and load the game file. I'm not exactly sure what the need was for such a huge file, I suppose the way the level ups and such cause the memory glut. Either way, if it could have been avoided, it should have.

Overall I like this title a lot. The gameplay features were just really well done and I really hope this title does well enough and Z-Axis is rewarded for their efforts, they certainly deserve it for the end product here. What I expected to be a decent rental turned into a must own title. I was continually surprised at the shear amount of things to do there are in this game. Aggressive Inline should not be overlooked by fans of the genre as it is not just another knock off title trying to cash in on the X-games. Of course, now we can only salivate at what Z-Axis has in mind for their next game, as I'm sure this title will warrant a sequel.