‘SSX’ Reborn? Arcade Snowboarder ‘Carveout 2160’ Shows Real Promise

Every now and then, a game preview drags you along on a nostalgia trip at lightspeed. Carveout 2160 is one of the best examples of this: a snowboarding hopeful that takes you back to the late 90s and early 2000s, where extreme sports titles were ten a penny, and nearly all of them completely ignored gravity.

The fifth and sixth console generations both popularized and ended a brilliant niche in gaming, when Activision’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was king (and led to superb spin-offs like Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX); the Dreamcast went its own predictably weird way with Jet Set Radio and TrickStyle; others tried to find even stranger directions with Razor Freestyle Scooter and, er, BMXXX.

But Carveout 2160 is a new IP in snowboarding, which was responsible for the fastest and maddest games of the era. What started with Cool Boarders and Snowboard Kids was soon transformed by 1080 Snowboarding, which completely rewrote the rulebook (even with its brutal controls), before THPS inspired devs to build games around culture and soundtracks, giving us the underrated MTV Sports: Pure Ride, the vastly overrated Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarding, and SSX Tricky: the best of the bunch.

Carveout 2160 doesn’t just draw on the obscene highs of SSX Tricky — it also folds Wipeout into the mix to promise a futuristic, win-or-die tournament in space, because why not?

It’s the next game from Byteparrot, the solo indie dev studio from Austrian developer Johannes Lugstein, who released Slopecrashers last year — and he’s clearly building on his debut’s more family-friendly foundations.

Carveout 2160 seems to be a T-for-Teen approach to the incredible Rollerdrome, where entertainment in space is still sports-focused, and “the quadrillionaire funding this whole space program had a great idea about taking the extreme in extreme sports to a whole other level: a high-speed snowboard competition to the death in which the winner will obtain all the riches they desire.”

It also aims to follow in the footsteps of SSX Tricky by being “easy-to-play, hard-to-master”, and has confirmed a few features:

• Four-player splitscreen
• Eight-player online multiplayer
• Game modes including races, trick events, and time attack
• Arcade snowboard mechanics including grinding, tricks and combo systems
• A boost system to break shortcut barriers and take down opponents
• Gadgets, such as grappling hooks and rocket thrusters

Even at this beta stage, the game looks pretty stunning — a nice mix between blockbuster locations, lightning-fast pace, and smooth trick mechanics, but it’s still early days — the lack of HUD is glaring (but you can assume it’ll have one), while some of the areas seem a bit sparse and underwhelming; courses may need a bit more going on.

It’s also in Unreal Engine, running on PC at max potential for the gameplay trailer, so you can only assume it’ll need plenty of optimization, even if its minimum specs (Ryzen 5 2600 @ 3.4 GHz / Intel Core I5-8400 @ 2.5 GHz; 8GB RAM; GeForce GTX 1050 TI 4GB / Radeon RX 570 8GB) are reasonable.

As it stands, Carveout 2160 is only lined up for PC, but hopefully Byteparrot will go the route of Sledding Game and bring it to consoles. In the meantime, you can wishlist it on Steam.