They’ve taken on BMX, skateboarding and surfing, and now Activision’s extreme sports division is tackling a much lesser known niche sport, wakeboarding (or mock surfing as some call it). Wakeboarding Unleashed featuring Shaun Murray sets out to do the same thing for wakeboarding as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater did for skateboarding, and for the most part succeeds in being fun and addicting. Although the PC version does fall prey to some minor issues such as gamepad incompatibility and murky textures, it remains essentially the same great game the console incarnations were.

For those not in the know, wakeboarding works on many of the same principles as water skiing, only with a board and not skis. You accomplish tricks by launching yourself into the air off of the wake of the boat to which your tether is connected or by grinding on poles or boats. You also have the ability to let go of the tether in order to launch yourself to higher areas and perform bigger and better tricks, hence the “Unleashed” in the game’s title (clever).

Wakeboarding Unleashed gives you control of one of seven professional wakeboarders as you progress through missions in 11 different stages. The missions are standard Tony Hawk fare, requiring you to earn a high score, interact with x number of people or objects, get a huge combo, collect letters to spell a certain word, and so on. What’s different is the addition of the driving missions, which have you racing a boat through a course. These missions are an interesting change of pace for the career mode, but goofy controls make the boat stages feel kind of hastily thrown together. There is also a Video Shoot mode in which you must perform tricks from the angle of a television camera, so it looks like you’re performing tricks on TV. This mode is very frustrating, because the camera angle is far from ideal, and isn’t nearly as fun as the rest of the game.

The game’s single-player mode may be a bit derivative, but the multiplayer aspects are pretty cool. There’s the stock Trick Attack and Horse, which are nothing new, but there’s also The Tug-O-War mode (which has you facing off against a friend and shortening their rope with successive tricks until they no longer have one) and the excellent co-op mode. The co-op mode has one player controlling the boat and the other player performing tricks, which is great fun and allows two players to explore the levels and rack up high scores together, a first in the extreme sports genre.

Aside from the slightly derivative career mode, the game does have a few more problems. The game suffers from some weird collision detection problems, as your wakeboarder will go through certain walls and boats like paper, but will biff it when coming in contact with a small rock or patch of reeds. Also, it’s not uncommon to get completely stuck inside a mountain or boat until the game frees you. Another problem in the PC version is incompatibility with some gamepads. While Aspyr claims that the game is compatible with most gamepads, it isn’t compatible with Logitech’s Dual Action Pad (which is the one that I happen to own) and a few others. This is a pretty big problem, since this is definitely the type of game that you’d want to play with a good gamepad and Aspyr hasn’t announced a patch as of this review.

The graphics are a bit of a mixed bag. The water effects are great, which dynamic reflections and nice animation. However, the environmental textures are slightly drab and the characters, while well animated, suffer from murky textures and don’t look quite as good as they do on the console systems.

The sounds are a nice change for the extreme sports genre. Instead of hashing a bunch of punk and nu-metal, Wakeboarding Unleashed’s soundtrack is composed mainly of classic rock from artists like Van Halen, Mountain, J. Giles Band and The Stooges. This soundtrack is certainly a breath of fresh air, getting away from the cookie-cutter music of most other extreme sports games. The sound effects are also pretty good. The engine sounds are realistic and the sound of the boat wake is clear and sounds great.

While the PC version sports weaker textures and graphics than the console versions (as well as some gamepad issues), Wakeboarding Unleashed still is a pretty good translation of a great extreme sports game. Anyone looking for something new and different from skateboarding should give wakeboarding a try.

Gameplay: 8.5
Wakeboarding is a completely different sport with a completely different dynamic from skateboarding, and Wakeboarding Unleashed does a great job of representing this. The controls as pretty tight, and the variety of moves you can do are great. The single-player missions are a bit derivative, however, pretty much rehashing the types of things you’d do in a Tony Hawk game. There are a few new mission types, like the boat racing and Video Shoot modes, but these feel sloppy and ill conceived.

Graphics: 8.0
Wakeboarding Unleashed features some great-looking water effects, which some cool reflections and animation. However, the environments are pretty drab, and the character models are composed of some pretty murky textures.

Sound: 9.0
The game’s soundtrack is a great breath of fresh air from most titles in the genre, composed primarily of classic rock hits by bands like Van Halen, the Flaming Lips and the Pixies. The sound effects are also accurate, crisp and clear.

Difficulty: Medium

Concept: 8.5
The mission structure is pretty derivative of Tony Hawk, but the gameplay is very different from the standard formula of extreme sports games. Wakeboarding is not really the type of sport that could easily be ported into a video game, but the development team did a fine job.

Multiplayer: 8.5
The game features some of the typical multiplayer modes that you’d find in other games, like Trick Attack or Horse. However, the coolest part of the multiplayer aspects is the co-op mode, which allows one player to wakeboard and the other to drive the boat.

Overall: 8.5
While the PC version is a bit weaker compared to its console counterparts, Wakeboarding Unleashed is still a fun game based on a lesser-known extreme sport.