The story is genuinely amazing and actually managed to get me emotional, but the game is just so fucking long and bloated for no good reason. From beginning to end, you are dragged through countless identical battles that serve almost no mechanical or narrative purpose. By cutting these unnecessary battles, you could shave off like 20-30 hours from the game and lose nothing.

Truthfully, it deserves a lower rating for the menagerie of shitty design choices alongside the filler, but the narrative highs manage to carry the experience.

Man, this one stings. I wanted to like this so badly, but after you get over the initial excitement of "wow hoverboards", the game reveals itself to be a trash fire with a cool coat of Y2K paint. The physics are straight-up awful because colliding with another racer (without drilling) will often just kill your momentum and launch you in a random direction. And even then, drilling an enemy will sometimes result in the same thing, or worse: you getting knocked down, defeating the entire purpose of the maneuver.

And WHY is there fall damage? That is quite possibly the lamest fucking thing that could've been included in a game about hoverboards. I could kind of understand if this only applied to, like, really high drops, but it's so over-zealous and will knock you down for very short drops. Speaking of which, the track design is baffling. There are ramps that send you up too high, luge rails that send you into walls, and alternate paths that are actually slower than the main one. It comes across as if the designers of the boards and tracks never actually spoke to each other.

These are minor issues that completely cripple the game and reduce your methods of approach in every track. You have to play so conservatively at times, which is just wrong in a game about hoverboards.