Much like one of my favorite games of 2011, Saints Row: The Third, the franchise reboot of SSX kicks off with a leap out of an airplane. And as in Saints Row, the section of Twilight Zone-esque endless sky serves as a tutorial to a variety of gameplay mechanics. When complete, you deploy a damn wingsuit and fly off, presumably to do something else equally awesome.

Soon after, you're quickly mastering one of three control variants (or all three), before jumping directly in to the world of mountains and snow and, uh, wingsuits (did I mention there are wingsuits?). I was doing 1080 Switch Tailgrabs in under five minutes!

But before I go on, let me first take you back to SSX's original name -- SSX: Deadly Descents. Aside from sounding like a brand of violent deodorant, that subtitle is a nod to the nine major mountain ranges featured in SSX, each with its own "Deadly Descent" (essentially a boss battle, but, ya know, on a snowboard). They are supposed to punctuate a particular gameplay hook for each range of mountains. And they almost ruin the game.