Wakeboarding has always been one of those sports that grabs my interest whenever I see it on television. You always know that there are people out there doing it but here in Australia it isn't really promoted heavily and therefore doesn't really have a great deal of mainstream appeal and coverage. This is a real shame as with the high number of Snowboarding and Water Skiing fans we have here, you would think a combination of both sports would be a sure fire hit. All the fun of Water Skiing, but mixed with all the cool tricks of Snowboarding, but also being pulled at 40 knots behind a speed boat sounds like plenty of fun to me!

Now what sort of ‘Extreme' sport would it be if Activision weren't able to grab one of the sports highest profile athletes and whack him in a game about it? With skateboarding, bmx, motoX, snowboarding and surfing among the other sports to have numerous games about them, well it was only a matter of time until a Wakeboarding title appeared, and with Activision being the kings of the ‘Extreme sport title' anticipation for Wakeboarding Unleashed Featuring Shawn Murray (from now on WBU) has been pretty high!

The hardest thing when writing this review has been to try and avoid comparisons with Tony Hawk and his skateboarding games but the similarities are there, it can't be denied. I will say though, that this is a good thing. The same moves, grinds, manuals flips and grabs are all there but the awesome feature in WBU is that you can let go of your tow rope! This brings a level of gameplay that I was never expecting as it allows you to pull off more stunts, find hidden items, gaps and shortcuts! You have to be careful though because this means that the boat is no longer pulling you along and momentum will soon take over and slow you down. If you get the momentum and angle spot on, let go of the rope at just the right time to perform your tricks and then get close enough back to the boat, they will throw the tow rope back to you and you can continue on! This was one of the hardest parts of the controls to get used to but is really rewarding when executed the way the developers intended it to be used.

The other controls are pretty straight forward, A to jump, X and a direction on the d-pad performs grab tricks, B and the d-pad does invert tricks, jump up to a rail and hit Y to do rail tricks. Double tap flips and grabs are also pretty easy to pull off and will reward you with extra points and in the air, you can do spins to help rack the points up. Up the top left hand corner of the screen there is also the ‘Groove meter'. This runs down as your time through the level progresses and you top it back up by doing tricks and combos which also just happen to fill up your ‘Special meter'. Fill this up and you can pull of even wilder stunts than normal. Personally I found some of these special moves pretty hard to pull off, even with a game guide that lists them all but if you are a hardcore Tony Hawk fan you wont have much trouble.. well most likely not as much as I did..

The graphics in WBU look great. The water simply looks fantastic with reflections and the wake from the boat looks amazing. The texture art is nice and sharp and colourful and the art guys did a great job. The water probably settles a little bit too quickly compared to what it would in real life but this really isn't anything that is going to ruin the game for anyone. It was unfortunate to see the occasional clipping error rear its ugly head and glitches like that in games say to me ‘not enough testing' or ‘lack of care'. I guess the reason for it is irrelevant really as it does happen and more than it should. On a positive note, it speeds up the game and doesn't mean that you crash into every obstacle and get slowed down for a small error on your part, so you can look at it as a blessing or a curse.

On a nice big television Wakeboarding Unleashed Featuring Shawn Murray really is a great looking game. The framerate stays nice and high and the 11 levels all look different and will take you ages to master and find all the shortcuts. If there is one criticism to make of the levels is that the goals you have to complete do get repetitive and when you fail a levels goals for the seventh time in a row it's time to go outside and take a break as there is a certain amount of frustration, but this is something most games of this type bring with them.

One nifty feature of the game that we gave a good workout is the multiplayer modes. WBU brings a nice new feature along, co-op play in a sports title! One player can drive the boat and the other controls the rider! We had a blast jumping the boat over the ramps and other obstacles and it made for some great entertainment at my last 'Xbox get-together'. Other multiplayer modes include Tug-O-war that sees your opponents rope get shorter as you pull off more and more tricks, the only thing is the same thing happens to you as he pulls off stunts! The loser is the player to run out of rope first. Trick Attack speaks for itself, the player with the highest point score when time runs out is the winner! H.O.R.S.E pits you in a turn based scenario, one player completes a trick and the other player has to beat it. Each player only has six seconds to start their trick. The co-op mode though is excellent fun and at the start you can choose between vertical and horizontal split screen modes. System Link would have been an excellent feature here but unfortunately this and Xbox Live! are not supported. Perhaps next time.

Unfortunately another glitch reared its ugly head here. Occasionally when starting up a split screen co-op game WBU would freeze and display a weird graphic glitch with two wake boarders frozen on the screen behind the boat and the only thing that would fix it was the reset switch. I haven't heard of any other instances of this from anyone else that's played the game but it had to be mentioned as it happened pretty regularly to our copy.