Cool Boarders has long been heralded as one of the PS1’s premiere extreme sports titles. Only recently have I become more of a fan of the concept in video games. I decided that Cool Boarders might be worth finally checking out. It’s an early release for the platform which kept me a bit wary about it. Developers routinely rushed their products to the market back then. Because 3D graphics were so new critics were more than willing to look past some pretty major issues at the time. This means that many of these games haven’t aged particularly well. I’ve recently discovered that Cool Boarders is one of the single best examples of this. Let’s dive right into this retro snowboarding title so I can show you exactly why it’s so underwhelming.
There’s nothing in the line of story of even scenario here. The characters don’t even have names. Am I angry about that? No, but it seems super lazy on the part of the developers that your only character options are simply labeled Male and Female. The fact that you can choose between the two genders is nice, but how hard would it have realistically been to give them names? That’s a perfect representation of the spirit behind Cool Boarders; it feels like the developers didn’t really care about the product. It’s a 3D snowboarding game and for the time the graphics were decent. Everything is rendered in polygons but you have just two camera settings. The first is your traditional behind the back perspective, and the second displays the action from a first person perspective. It’s a neat idea but doesn’t work for this kind of game.
The gameplay engine in Cool Boarders is a little off. It feels like you’re skating on sand rather than cutting into fresh powder. There’s a poor sense of momentum, and it feels too stiff in my opinion. Cool Boarders lacks a lot of options found in other similar titles from this era. There isn’t a traditional trick system per se, nor are there any alternate paths. Cool Boarders has almost no bells and whistles, which for a game of this type, is the kiss of death. By nature snowboarding games just don’t have a lot of variety in terms of stage design and themes. It’s a snowy mountains for crying out loud. Unfortunately Cool Boarders doesn’t even meet the minimum standards in several ways. As I mentioned earlier there are only two characters, and these have very few options.
You can pick between three different sets of clothes for each of the two characters which is pretty lame to be honest. On the flip side there are several different board options each with their own handling qualities. I experimented with this quite a bit but was hard pressed to notice any kind of difference even when using drastically different gear. You can however change the color of them but that doesn’t make up for how similar they all are. The really disappointing part of Cool Boarders however is that you only have three different stages. All are extremely short, and very narrow. You can literally see all the content in the Cool Boarders disc in just a few minutes. With a distinct lack of extra modes there’s almost zero reasons to return. I would have felt ripped off had I purchased this one for full price.
Even the basic gameplay is a bit lame to be honest. Cool Boarders is not even really a racing game to be honest. To be one it would have to feature opponents competing against you in some way. Instead this is a solo affair where the timer is the only antagonist to be found. You have to reach checkpoints before it runs out otherwise it’s game over. It’s not like that’s a huge problem though because you can simply retry the course. Most of the time you’ll be doing so because with only three level options the scenery is going to start looking real familiar real fast. To make matters worse they re-use almost the same assets across all three. The occasional building is nice, but the only major differences I found between the three are time of day, and one features a jump over a ravine. That’s just sad.
The controls are also pretty poor. As I mentioned earlier it feels more like you’re skating through sand than going downhill on snow covered slopes. Steering is super clunky and performed with the directional pad. The problem is the characters here are incapable of throwing their weight in any direction which makes gameplay feel really awkward. By holding down the square button you can turn harder, but this often causes the board to flip the wrong direction. It’s just not an intuitive system. You can hop on the board, but I really don’t see much use in doing so except in that singular ravine I mentioned earlier. Cool Boarders just isn’t a lot of fun to play, and there are even instances where you can get stuck in the obstacles here.
I’m usually pretty forgiving when it comes to early games on their respective platforms when it comes to graphics. Unfortunately Cool Boarders is just too rough looking, and it’s not exactly like the developers devoted too much time on content or anything to make this one pretty. The textures suffer from the typical PS1 low resolution blocky designs. The snow looks more like rocks in some cases. The characters are also pretty bad. They are just painfully generic. To make matters worse it’s difficult to tell what some of the clothing is that they’re supposed to be wearing. All of this would be forgivable if the framerate was good, but it’s not. The game coasts by with sub 30fps gameplay. The already plain visuals should have allowed for a big upgrade to the engine but unfortunately that’s not the case. The soundtrack is also lame with generic pop/punk riffs.
