A Review: 3Xtreme, PSOne 1999

Hello and welcome once again. The review that I will be posting this time is for the game 3Xtreme, an extreme sports racing game for the PlayStation One.

 

3Xtreme is an extreme sports racing game developed and published by 989 Sports for the PlayStation One in 1999. This is one of those games that I found on a website sometime in late 2020 and thought would be worth playing. More than anything, it was because I had yet to play a game in my time that was from this genre. I've played plenty of racing games featuring bikes and roller skates, but more than anything, they were games aimed at kids in arcades or on the early Nintendo and Sega systems. None of those games were too serious or genre-focused, either. This was one of the first games that I found, with the focus being on extreme sports such as downhill mountain biking and road races featuring inline skates. The gameplay basically boils down to taking one of a fixed set of skaters or bikers and racing through various events and across various disciplines and settings. From what I can find, this game didn't do too well commercially and was something of a money pit, having consumed millions in marketing from Sony at the time. Sales were lacklustre and never met the predicted targets, which saw this as the final game in the Xtreme series of games.

In my opinion, this game was a steaming pile code in the middle of the road at the height of summer. Once I had scratched the surface, I found 3Xtreme to be just as bad as what I had read about online, but having started, I refused to quit and grinded my way through. Over the course of a week, I managed to complete everything that I felt had worth in this game and then put it into a backup folder and forgot about it. The gameplay is dull and gets repetitive fast. The A.I. racers are either completely idiotic or so sharp that there is literally no way to beat them legitimately. Far too often, I had to resort to ramming opponents, cutting corners, and generally dirty racing tactics to get the first place I so badly wanted. The tracks and worlds around them were boring and repetitive. It was also very obvious that asset pasting was common in the later stages of the game. Some of the tracks were clearly not playtested fully, as there were some bizarre collision boxes and hang-ups at times. Unlocks were poorly spaced and didn't really feel like they made much of a difference during play. It didn't really matter if you got them anyway, given how clunky and unresponsive the control inputs were. The A.I. was clearly able to cheat and would have insane speed and control boosts that the player could never hope to achieve. The whole game was a mess, and I honestly struggled to get through it.

Visually, I thought that this was a very ugly game. The roads and paths looked out of place and were monotonous and dull. The walls and fences were of a lower texture quality than the surrounding environments and stood out for all the wrong reasons. The backgrounds were just horrid and looked like a 3D picture had been forced onto a single-dimensional plane and then stretched out. This made the details look blotchy and out of place, with some trees and fauna just resembling smushed broccoli, in my opinion. The seas, rivers, and other water sources were block blues; that was it; no details or effects at all. The background objects were low-resolution repeated textures that were not at all attractive, and the character bodies were squares and rectangles, with the odd triangle thrown in for fun. Don't even get me started on the facial features, or, should I say, the complete lack of them. All of the characters looked like they'd all hit a wall at 70 mph, face first, and tried to walk it off. The only things that were of consistently good quality were all of the sponsor decals and company logos, making it obvious where most of the effort went.

Overall, I found this game a letdown and one of those completely forgettable titles that leaves you wondering why you bothered putting in so much time. Though I will be fair and say that this isn't the worst game I have by far, it is still pretty crap.

4/10 – Could've Been Better!

Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ