2Xtreme (2024) [PS4] review

“Get some air”

2Xtreme came out in November 1996 when I was 11 years old and while at the time my contemporaries were playing games such as Super Mario 64 or Resident Evil, I was playing 2Xtreme (like the radical little hipster I was). It was the sequel to ESPN Xtreme Games, but the second installment dropped the ESPN licensing and kept going as its own thing. And now this childhood gem has been re-released on PS4 as a PS1 Classic (and for anyone else that cares, it also has trophies!).

2Xtreme has the player racing through 12 different courses against 9 competitors across a multitude of areas. It plays less like a Tony Hawk or SSX trick-a-thon and more like a weaponless Road Rash game on skateboards.

At the time of writing, it’s been about 25 years since I last played this game so my plan of attack is pretty simple. I first want to jump into a season and get reacquainted with the game and (hopefully) not ruin my childhood nostalgia while I bring you, dear reader, along for the ride. After a little refresher on the controls, I’ll focus on completing the season which consists of 12 tracks. Some PS1 main menus are just not intuitive to a modern gamer so after fumbling around the 2Xtreme main menu for a little longer than I would like to admit, I selected my character, Bones Oneil. The characters may not be modeled after real people like in a Tony Hawk game but their names do go hard. Each character has their own set of unique stats that give them advantages in certain situations. You are also able to fully customize a character and allocate points to specific attributes as you choose. 

Now as I said before there are twelve total tracks in the game located in four different areas: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Japan, and Africa. Why are two cities, one a country and the last one an entire continent, you ask? I assume the devs didn’t trust the basic American child’s brain back in 1996 to know a city name like Kyoto or Nairobi and that was probably true if I’m being honest. In each region you race on different equipment: skateboard in Los Angeles, rollerblade in Las Vegas, Cycle in Africa, and snowboard in Japan. 

I was off to a rough start in my first race back in the saddle as I don’t think I was supposed to still be behind the starting line hopping up and down as the other nine racers got fully out of sight. But I persisted and figured out X is to accelerate (look at the controls menu before starting a game, I implore you). In the bottom left corner of the screen I see the stamina bar which depletes as I speed up but then replenishes once I crouch. This also works as a health bar since you can punch and kick the other racers to knock them down for points. Each track is littered with pedestrians and obstacles trying to take you off your feet and because of this in conjunction with the NPCs ability to slap me in the back of the head, I spent a lot of time lying on the ground.

Every course features gates that I was able to pass through. Colored gates score you points: yellow is for 150 points, red gates for 250, and the green ones are worth 500. There are purple gates that control a moveable obstacle like mailboxes or signs for me to skate into headfirst. There are also gates with symbols above them which are power-ups that can make you jump higher, regain stamina, empower your attacks, or give you a speed boost.

Not to brag, but I managed to finish in 10th place out of 10 racers in the first race of the season.

Now that I’ve started to develop my Xtreme sea legs (poorly) I’m just going to jump into the second race, Los Angeles 2. I did awful, I think I might have hit a dog walking across the street which is horrific and finished 10th… again. After finishing a couple of races, I noticed there was a trick score tally listed on the end-race stats prompt. I had no idea how to perform said tricks and every time I went off a jump Bones just flapped his dumb arms in the air like he was trying to fly away from my terrible gaming. Before the third race, I was determined to try to figure out how to do tricks. Eventually, I had to resort to looking it up online since even the controls layout in the options screen doesn’t say anything about how to perform tricks. I later discovered the physical game manual does explain tricks (I ordered a physical copy off eBay) but I was playing this on PS4 and didn’t have access to the physical copy at the time.

Besides being awful at racing (and doing tricks), races 3-6 were a blast….except for race six. The sixth race had me skateboarding on Los Angeles 2. And this is by far the worst course in the whole game. It’s super dark, like I’m skateboarding through Los Angeles during a city-wide blackout. You can barely see.

Race eight was my first snowboarding course, Japan 2. This is the most dangerous snowboarding hill I have ever seen. There are brick walls, metal fences, and what looks like water cooler jugs sitting all over this course. At least in Las Vegas and Los Angeles I can chalk up most of the dangers to very dumb pedestrians trying to cross the road at inopportune times and maybe an overzealous course marshal setting up a little too many safety barriers, but Japan is just a death trap. Also, there are poor little foxes and deer just hanging out on the slopes trying not to get pile-drived by ten people trying to “dew the do”.

In my first full season of 2Xtreme in 25 years, I didn’t do too well. I ended up placing ninth overall but that did not hinder my enjoyment. Changing between snowboarding in Japan to biking in Africa to skating in LA was great. Everything played pretty similarly but the learning curve to excelling at this game is steep. To place in the top three I generally had to forgo trying to score a lot of tricks and vice versa. I did end up going for the platinum trophy in this game which made me beat the high scores or fastest times in 12 of the 24 possible records. This was a fun test of skills that added some flare to this already challenging game. 

The controls may be a little stiff and it takes a little while to get comfortable with the pace of the game (it’s so fast). I related 2Xtreme to Road Rash earlier but there is an option to turn fighting off if you want to focus on racing instead of punching. 2Xtreme is a fun alternative racing game from a bygone era and it’s easily accessible on modern PlayStation consoles now. While it’s not going to attract a brand new crowd, I think those curious about the olden days or seeking its nostalgic touch may want to check this out for themselves.

PIXEL PERFECT

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TigerCastle spends his days thinking about the next RPG or platinum trophy he can tackle. His nights are spent making YouTube videos and hosting a couple podcasts, First & Last (a TV podcast) and Mega Potion (a podcast that attempts to talk about video games). You can also find him on the highest peak spreading the good word of the Suikoden series.