There are several games that make traversing a mountain range worthwhile. There’s SSX 3, a snowboarding game released on the PS2 which featured an open world in which you can snowboard from the top of the mountain, all the way down to the bottom without any loading screens. Yup, it was a pretty visceral experience at that time.
There’s also Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. Another open world title for the PS2 which has your mercenary character romping around North Korea. Pretty awesome this, traversing through a mountain range just to fire off missiles onto an unsuspecting military base.
Then there’s Fallout 4. Wandering around the countryside, going up and down hills, stirring up trouble with the odd Deathclaw or two, and bumping into one of those mosquito-like mutants in irradiated swamps. Ahh…those memories.
There’s one new game in town that makes the mountain your own. Megagon Industries’ Lonely Mountains: Downhill has just been released several days ago for the Nintendo Switch, and I’ve covered its impending launch on the platform previously. While the downhill mountain biking game previously made the PC, Mac, PS4 and the Xbox One its home, it’s a shame to admit that I’ve never played it.
But once I started playing the game on the Switch, this game, featuring really pretty low-poly aesthetics, has been unputdownable as the gameplay makes for an adrenaline rush as you pedal your way downhill, braking whenever appropriate, using gravity as an assist, going after switchbacks and accelerating to make your jumps. It kinds of gives you the feeling that hey, that’s what it feels like doing the real thing (exhilarating ride, minus the actual sense of physical danger).
Lonely Mountains’ reward system incentivises players to keep on hitting the trails, using each opportunity as practice, to fine-tune their approach going downhill, cutting down on crashes, improving theirs times in each segment of a course, making use of shortcuts and even taking some risks. In return, players unlock new trails, along with new bikes and parts.
The game comes with an online leaderboard to let you see how you match up with the rest of the world. For me however, I’ve been caught up making blooper reels of fail attempts in-game. I admit that the first time I played, a crashed so much it took the better part of the evening to finish the course. I’ve gotten a little better since, but do sit back and enjoy:
There are some performance issues to take note of. The draw distance isn’t that great, and there’s some stuttering here and there with the gameplay, but these are just minor annoyances. Overall, we rate Lonely Mountains: Downhill a deserving 4.5/5.
Lonely Mountains: Downhill is now available on the Nintendo Switch. Check it out over here: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/lonely-mountains-downhill-switch/
