Guess I'm gonna take this one for a... whirl.
Yeah, it's Tony Hawk but on Scooters and with the lamest cast of characters you could imagine, the hero is actually named "Wasa B." which I'm sure wouldn't fly by today's standards. The said, every character has a decent assortment of costumes, which was an unexpected extra. The game has 8 different levels, 7 of them have the same sort of goals: X amount of points, defeat two bosses, destroy the generator(Hidden behind the gate that beating both bosses unlock), perform X trick somewhere, destroy or do 5 or something, collect 3 music CDs. It's very formulaic, to say the least. On the other hand, every level unlocks a Race against a CPU enemy AND you can also get a different bonus per stage, and this are more varied, a mini-billiards stage in which you must push balls into holes, an arena in which you must defeat three bosses, etc.
As for modes, there's Arcade and Story, which are basically identical, 3 minutes to complete goals, just like Tony Hawk, and Practice, which you'd guess it's like Free Skate, except it isn't, you have an arbitrary 30 minute limit. Lame. The soundtrack is pretty good though. I mean, my music taste is very punk, so most of these 'extreme sports' games tend to have soundtracks that appeal to my personal tastes, so I'm a bit biased!
The game controls exactly like Tony Hawk, which is great for your muscle memory, but it feels super slow. Instead of a SPECIAL gauge you get a turbo gauge to use with L2. But still, when you compare this game to Tony Hawk it feels like it drags so slowly, to the point that the fun factor goes down. To stand out they actually give you a health gauge, and if you run out of health your run ends, your health goes down whenever you bail or get hit by a boss. Can't say I was a fan of this mechanic. This game has no analogue to Tony Hawk's revert, which hurts combo potential. Bosses are fairly easy, although to be fair some have unique attacks, such as shockwaves you must jump, and in order to hurt them you simply need to jump and do a trick on them. Early bosses are super easy, but by the end of the game they take an enormous amount of punishment before they go down. Luckily, stages have power ups spread throughout, some make your next jump by higher, others heal you, which are a godsend.
Whirl Tour is acceptable, it sticks to Tony Hawk's formula, a proven formula that works well, but it lacks its pizzazz and attitude, so it ends up feeling like a feeble charade of that series. There's nothing broken about it, everything works like it should, but I feel like there are slightly better alternatives, like Aggressive Inline, or, well, you could go for the much better alternatives, a proper Tony Hawk game.
5.5
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