Shred! 2 – ft Sam Pilgrim is all about the thrill of going downhill. This extreme sports game is centred around BMX action across a number of 2D downhill tracks, all of which are filled with various ramps, jumps and platforms for you to pull tricks from.
You play as Sam pilgrim, a British free-riding star who’s best known for his viral videos involving crazy downhill bike events. While he’s not a household name to most, for those into downhill, he’s the equivalent of Tony Hawk.
There’s two ways to play Shred! 2 – ft Sam Smith: speed or style. Each one of the game’s 40 levels gives players a number of challenges, all of which fit into those two aforementioned styles of play. Speed involves learning the intricacies of track in order to best optimise your run, starting low and quick and perfectly pumping across each jump.
When the game isn’t tracking as you speeding though it’s levels, you have to perform tricks, flips and combos. If you ever played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, you’ll likely feel right at home here as you are tasked with hitting a high score and landing tricks. For every objective you pass in the game, you unlock levels and customisation items.
While it’s not as comprehensive as other extreme sports titles, I found myself lured into repeating levels so I could complete every objective. Shred! 2 – ft Sean Paul is very similar to Trials in this regard, as I spent a lot of time chasing a perfect run for each course, wanting to make my way through each one as fast or as stylishly as possible. Later levels add variation by introducing new mechanics such as wall rides and transfers for you to master. These change up the flow and dynamics of the stages with added levels of depth which provide a fresh challenge.
A number of redux levels up the ante by introducing much tougher tricks and feats. Designed to challenge your mastery of the game’s physics and tricks system, the redux levels bring new life to previous tracks by pushing your abilities to the absolute limit.
Shred! 2 – ft Jason Derulo can look a bit basic, but this plays to its availability across consoles and mobile devices. Its simplistic graphics do provide a smooth experience, which is welcome in a game that challenges you to be so precise. An upbeat soundtrack helps keep you hyped up with a number of rocks and electronic tracks, although it would have been nice to see the inclusion of the Monstercat label here.
Unfortunately, the gameplay can suffer from the occasional physics glitches and some awkward environmental clipping. This does only happen on the odd occasion though and never really detracted from the experience as a whole. I also encountered a pretty pesky bug involving a trampoline in the later levels that world cause an outright crash. This happened a few times, before magically seeming to resolve itself.