The fact that Aggressive Inline takes place on a set of skates doesn’t radically change the gameplay. Anyone who has laid hands on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater or Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX before touching Aggressive Inline will have no problem jumping into the fray. What Z-Axis has done, however, is made several improvements to the quickly waning formula companies like Z-Axis and Neversoft have been constnatly exploiting to make their yearly releases special.

Take, for example, bailing. In previous extreme sports titles, if you screwed up a trick off a ramp and went sailing off sideways, your head was about to say hello to the pavement. Not so here. Simply hold down Circle and your character will straighten out, allowing you to land the trick you started. Does it dumb down the gameplay? Perhaps, but it makes skating around far less frustrating for new players and experienced gamers alike and creates for some insanely hilarious looking maneuvers. And while a slightly less revolutionary touch, Aggressive Inline allows players to grasp onto both vertical and horizontal poles. Vaulting off benches and cars is even possible. The linking possibilities for tricks is nearly limitless.

In Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2, Z-Axis introduced enormous stages that still manage to be well designed. In Aggressive Inline, if you can believe it, the designers have managed to increase the size of the stages to several times the size of areas found in their previous efforts. The amount of space to skate, grind, stall and smash your head into the ground is absolutely insane. If you can see it, chances are there is a way to reach it through a series of well-timed jumps from grind location to grind location. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, eat your heart out! Neversoft’s stages are not even one fourth of the size, if that, of Aggressive Inline's. The game follows the standard level theme formula (industrial stage, theme park stage, etc.), but repetitive it is not. In the first stage alone, players can be skating through Hollywood Boulevard, multiple movie sets and a studio parking lot – and this isn't even counting the hidden areas.

Despite the fact that Z-Axis games are consistently entertaining, each of them has run into a similar problem of being released decidedly unpolished. Sadly, Aggressive Inline is no different. During an ordinary run through a level, expect to find yourself falling through floors and magically appearing in an entirely different area, gliding through walls and becoming stuck or most commonly, watching as the camera completely freaks out and takes several moments to recover from the video game equivalent of an epileptic seizure. Resolution dropping was a frequent problem in Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2 that has been mostly rectified in Aggressive Inline, but pixelation and a generally coarse look to the game’s polygons is still present.

Even though Aggressive Inline is not a total departure from its extreme sports roots, the new elements it introduces are enough to make it a welcome entry to the genre. Extreme sports fans are sure to find more than enough to keep them busy until the slightly improved Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 hits.