Developer: Toppluva AB
Publisher: Microids
Reviewed For: Nintendo Switch
Also Available On: PC, Mobile
The success of mobile games is sometimes misconstrued as the success of the game itself and not the convenience or happenstance around it. For example, one of the first games to ever come out on the App Store, a simple tank game called iShoot, was able to generate something like $500,000 profit for the developer. This dude immediately decided that he was a design God, quit his job and then reinvested most of that money into developing a second shooting game, only this time it was a first person endeavor that used the paid likeness of a biathlon Olympian. Surprise: the game didn’t sell much and the dude lost almost all that money he made. His app wasn’t the best tank game ever, it was just one of sixteen apps available when the App store launched. App developers used to confused availability with popularity, and that can really bite someone on the ass.
Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderland is the full console version of mobile title Grand Mountain Adventure, a skiing or snowboarding game in which you have to navigate down a series of courses and stay between the flags, like every skiing challenge you’ve ever seen or heard of. For the original, it was a fun little game that relied heavily on the touchscreen and split second reactions for when the course changed direction. It also looked quite nice: rather than go for hyper cartoony or ultra realistic, Grand Mountain Adventure drifted in the middle, having sharp snow and landscape textures balanced with a simple but detailed sprite for the main character. It’s decent, and it’s a great game to play on the train or even waiting in the elevator, as it’s very easy to pick up and put down.
Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderland takes that same idea and attempts to blow it up into something much bigger, and it…well, it doesn’t exactly work. First and foremost, it advertises itself as an open world skiing/snowboarding expedition, yet that’s simply not true. Yes, you can move between different slopes and courses, but the landscape between them is very limited and has almost no interaction within. There are NPCs that you don’t talk to, various stands and buildings that you don’t go into, and roped off areas that are impossible to enter. You can move between mountains, but the transition is a quick jump with the implication of a helicopter taking you there. There’s no interactive quality here that makes it feel like anything but a world map, like you would see in a traditional platformer or other adventure game.
Once you get onto a mountain, you have a choice of trails that become unlocked as you complete previous courses at higher speeds, netting stronger medals. The first few courses of Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderland are almost embarrassingly easy, but that makes sense: you want players to get used to the feel and approach to the game. You can have the same level of headway as either skier or snowboarder, with the only difference being a bit of handling and also personal aesthetic. You can hop and jump as you go down the slopes, but I strongly, strongly advise against doing this. For one, it’s pointless: this isn’t an SSX game, so points and stunts don’t exist. You can add some style points to your downhill run, but it’s not enough to tip the scales as much as a good time will. Additionally, the jumping is one of the ways that you’re guaranteed to mess up a run. The flags are straightforward, but not in a straight line, and the likelihood that a jump will delay your success and cause you to miss a flag set is incredibly high.
Now, if you like the gameplay style of Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderland, the game does an amazing job of supporting your play and giving you more and more of what you want. There is a scaling difficulty that asks you to pay attention and do more the further along you get, so you really can’t complain if you want a challenge to rise up and strike you. If you miss a flag or take a tumble, it’s a quick press of a button to reset back to the top without any cutscenes and take the run again, no harm no foul. The courses also feel more realistic as you move on, with the flags and pathway never becoming obscene or silly, but, instead, really crafted to align with salom approaches and what snowbirds might recognize as actual inspired courses (if you’ve ever been to Avon,CO it really hits home).
Speaking of which, I wasn’t clear about the graphics at the beginning. The mobile version is alright, no problems there. Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderland is GORGEOUS in comparison, and really lands a ton of ambience and feeling off being alive and entrenched in the powder. Sure, when an avalanche happens, it’s more of a minor inconvenience than something that could threaten the life of everyone on the mountain, but I get the impression that utter realism isn’t the purpose of this game, not in that aspect. You just want to zone out and ski/snowboard, seeing and feeling a bit of success from a bird’s eye view and taking it all in as you merrily move along.
But my point still stands at the end. Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderland might really hit home for some people, and I don’t fault them for it. If you love arcade style sports games with low incentive to keep playing other than the joy of playing, then enjoy the hell out of this and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The tags and the name, though, gave me entirely different expectations, and I imagine it might for other people as well. There’s just not enough of this for me to take my handheld gaming machine, capable of epic RPGs and vicious fighting games, and then waste my time watching a toy soldier go tumbling down a pretty mountain. It gives you a lot, but that’s not enough: it doesn’t deliver what is promised.
A pretty game with no substance, Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderland left me cold and bored.
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1 Comment
Although the low rating, I quite enjoyed this review as the developer of the game 🙂