X-Bladez: Inline Skater

The Good
There's absolutely no redeeming qualities about it.

The Bad
The graphics are totally unappealing with extremely boxy models, dull environments and poor animations.

You have an abysmal cast of totally dull, lifeless characters who can't speak, have no story, no personality and make no relationships. Plus they use the same abilities and use the same tricks, except that each character have their own two special tricks, one grind trick performed by pressing Up, Up, Triangle, and one air trick performed by pressing Up, Up, Circle.

The game only has about 7 or 8 levels in the whole game, with the 2nd track being the same as the first, but in reverse and at night. And each of the levels are divided into two parts: Qualify, in where you have to acheive a certain number of points to advance, and RACE, in where you race against an unlockable character with obstacles. And for every other level, you will have to do the same things over and over again, which makes this game get really old very fast.

When you first start the game, you will only have 2 characters at the start. But as you collect 6 monkey tokens in every Qualifying part and 6 Wheel tokens in every Race part, you will unlock 5 more characters, also including the Robot, which is the only character, who can jump alot higher than all the other default characters in the game.

The controls in the game are also pretty bad. Grinding takes a while to do, as, before you land on a rail, you have to press a direction and then Triangle to grind, but then you have to hold down the Triangle button, because when you let go of it, you will walk off. Doing tricks is as simple as in the Tony Hawk games: Hold a direction and press either square or circle to do a trick.

The music is just crap. Most of it just consists of dull sounding rock, cheesy techno and porn music. The music in the first level is by far the worst song in the entire game, that will make you suffer in horrible pain. Trust me. If you ever going to listen to this, when you find it on YouTube, you are going to suffer into heavy grief and pain for listening to this!

The Bottom Line
This is just the worst game ever made, and it's also the worst inline skating game ever made. It's just a shame that this is the ONLY inline skating game available on the PS1, and there aren't any better ones on the PS1.

If you're going for a full PS1 library, you'll be buying this game regardless. You can find it almost anywhere for dirt cheap.

If you're not going for a full PS1 library and you simply weed out the best, then you have to toss this game out with the clippings.

But if you're not going for a full PS1 library, and you still own this, you have to destroy this game immediately!

And if you're looking for a good inline skating game, play Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast and even modern systems or Aggressive Inline for the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube.