In Freekstyle, from EA Sports, you ride a motorcycle around a hilly track, flying off the hills into the air, where you can quickly perform stunts, lifting hands or feet, standing on the bike or spinning it around, and then trying to get back in position before landing. While those looking for a realistic motocross game are likely to prefer THQ's MX Superfly, which is more successful in creating a convincing facsimile of the sport, I was far more taken with Freekstyle's more extreme and unrealistic take on motocross. The game is full of huge ramps that you can blast up at enormous speed, and, unlike real motocross, it lets the player fly hundreds of feet into the air to do several elaborate tricks in a row. Successful tricks give you bursts of speed, and enough successful tricks allow you to perform a special trick that results in yet more speed.
The tracks themselves are fun and fanciful and include an amusement park and a rocket launchpad. There are multiple paths and secret areas. You often have the opportunity to crash through windows and soar through rings of fire.
While it has great tracks and tricks and a wonderful over-the-top sensibility, Freekstyle is frustrating as a racing game. Since it's not much fun to be either so far ahead or so far behind that no one is nearby, racing games generally cheat to keep the competitors bunched together. If you encounter some setbacks and fall far behind, the other racers will slow down until you catch up; if you race brilliantly, your competitors all speed up. In general this is a good idea, but Freekstyle implements it poorly.
Repeatedly I would build up a comfortable lead, and then, just 10 yards from the finish line, a biker would shoot past me. I found that one can race very poorly for the first two laps, spend the first half of the third lap catching up and building up the power of the boost meter, which gives you those bursts of speed, and then just race flat out for half a lap to win. It is an unsatisfactory way to race.
This doesn't make Freekstyle a bad game by any means -- it is very entertaining -- but it does feel a little unfair. And that makes it less addictive than Stuntman. In Stuntman, you are convinced that all it will take to succeed is one more attempt, and time and again this proves to be the case, although that "one more" might actually turn out to be 10 more. With Freekstyle, you feel as though the other racers are cheating, and that if you come in first, it will be through a mix of luck and of having learned the quirks of the game, rather than through skillful racing.
In the end, Freekstyle is most enjoyable if you don't care about winning. Victories allow you to unlock unavailable tracks. (But then so will going to my favorite cheat site, www.gamefaqs.com, and looking up the cheat code that unlocks all the tracks.)
Stuntman, on the other hand, is a game I wouldn't want to cheat on, because I always feel that I can beat the game on my own. I just have to give up sleeping.
Freekstyle and Stuntman are both available for the PlayStation2.
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