With four blinding-white, wide open mountains to bomb down, trek up, and trick around, the limitless potential for Shaun White Snowboarding to be a stellar simulation had me by the stones before I even knew about the 16 player multiplayer. But the vast open-endedness of the multilayered trails doesn't quite work like you might expect. Shaun White's contrived inclusion might be the game's biggest misstep, as his predetermined objectives limit your ability to explore and make for some of the least extreme offline boarding on the market.

It's hard to take Shaun White seriously in the game he's slapped his name on. First off, in contrast to the gorgeously rendered mountains and hordes of riders that litter them, The Flying Tomato's character model is grotesque. Even a Nintendo Wii would recoil in horror at the muddily-textured and indiscernible face. When he's done his hilariously clichéd yapping about how sick that bail was, duuuude, you realize that his presence only serves to tell you about your sole, incredibly lame objective: coin collecting. As you explore the various mountains in search of collectible coins, it dawns on you that this isn't a snowboarding game, but an atrocious platformer.

Because of the questionable controls, however, the game fails to lend itself to anything but casual riding, thus negating the need for sandbox-y mountains. The awkward trick system sees you frantically flicking your sticks in order to pull off flips and grabs before you tap the left trigger to line up your landing, while your created character often refuses to go where you want. Whether it's because of invisible walls or crummy on-screen response to your button presses, you'll constantly find yourself restarting a run to nail a perfect line in order to nab a collectible. A graciously implemented warp system alleviates a lot of the frustration of the trial-and-error that you'll unquestionably endure in your collect-a-thon quest, but there isn't ever a point where the core mission becomes fun.

It's satisfying to finally nail a perfect run, but you'll inch and limp your way forward by laying down warp markers every time you achieve a lengthy jump or perfect jib across a chasm just to avoid doing it again. You'll hunt down three coins on each of the four mountains four times before finally reaching the Triple Slam competition, with each of the 12 collectibles becoming more frustrating to find and annoying to actually get to.

The game slowly doles out special abilities to you as you advance as a way to reward you once in a while – you can earn cash, but you'll only ever spend it on boards since new gear is useless and a waste of money. The ability to smash through walls lets you enter previously inaccessible caves and a speed boost allows you to cross crumbling ice-bridges, while a super-jump sees you launching hundreds of feet in the air if you hit a ramp just right. But these abilities only complicate the on-board platforming stuff and using your speed boost to cross bridges will only make you lose even more control of your board, while smashing through icy walls will slow you down as you stop to ensure you're going the right way in a cave with forked exits.