K2 Darkstar - 2011

SB-RV Review

Before you read any further, I should come clean and tell you that the Darkstar was my board of choice for the winter of 2009/2010 and that I loved its snappy feel, medium flex, traditional camber and all round skills. The Darkstar is a board with an impressive reputation, a do it all twin which could, in my opinion, have grown to have a reputation to rival other classics like the Burton Custom or Ride DH. K2 have kept the Darkstar affordable but their new policy of abandoning traditional cambered boards means the 2010/2011 version is now sporting a zero cambered base. Now I had never before tried a zero cambered board but I have friends who swear by them, so I was looking forward to seeing what this innovation had done to my beloved Darkstar. Unfortunately I was a little disappointed, to me the zero camber felt slightly dull. The flex was still familiar, torsionally and along the board’s length, the graphics were barely discernible from last years and it still felt like a Darkstar, but it just seemed like the snap had been taken out of it. Ok, I was riding early morning icy pistes but this board was not filling me with much confidence. It seems to me that K2 have tried to stay close to the original design by only moving to a zero camber, rather than reverse – but personally I would have preferred them to have left the Darkstar’s camber well alone – it wasn’t broken so why try to fix it? The Darkstar is still a good all round board, a medium flex which will do anything, and for intermediate riders would be a good buy for learning to progress in the park and elsewhere on the mountain. In my opinion though, it seems the Darkstar may now be taking a back seat at K2 to the awesome reverse-cambered Parkstar, which in truth would probably be the board I would choose out of the two. Maybe I’m just being grumpy, I love my 2009 Darkstar but I’ll still bow to the superior knowledge of the K2 boys, if they say the zero camber suits the board better, then I guess it does. I’ll just be sure to hang on to my 09/10 model, the last of the cambered Darkstars and a classic like the Mk1 Golf GTi.

Posted by Ben Molloy in • K2