Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands

Review

Skiing is without a doubt one of the most popular winter sports in the world.  There are around 125 million skiers on our lovely planet. I, for instance, was fortunate enough to be born close to the largest chain of mountains in Europe, The Alps! So, skiing was part of my upbringing. It’s a fantastic feeling, sliding down a mountain at your own pace, feeling free, experiencing the cold wind and being treated to spectacular views on top of that. It’s definitely a chilling bliss. So, when I received a key for Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands, I was excited and intrigued to play the game.

Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands is a top-down sports simulation adventure/ exploration game developed by Toppluva AB and published by Microids on the 11th of March 2022 on the Steam platform. The game is also available on Nintendo Switch, Android and IOS.

The game consists of 12 beautiful ski resorts to explore, each of which has a set of challenges to complete and collectable to find. You can play this game single-player or co-op with up to 4 people.

I was mainly worried about the top-down perspective in this game because I have only played ski simulations on VR and in the third-person view. But it didn’t take me long to enjoy the game, and I felt completely at ease from the top-down perspective. Before I get into it, let me enlighten you about the fundamentals of the game.

Each level (resort) has several ski lifts to access the higher grounds, but only a couple of these ski lifts will be available to you at the start of each level. You must gather several ski passes to unlock the next ski lift and the next resort. You can earn ski passes by completing challenges such as Super G, Downhill, Ski Jumps etc. However, when you bring on the map, as each of the resorts is quite large, you’ll be able to see groups of 4 stars with the breathing lighting effect around each of the levels, which represents either a ski pass location or a new event to discover. To give you an idea, I have unlocked 6 of the 12 ski resorts so far, and the total ski passes to collect per level has varied from 40 to 80.  And by the way, I haven’t been able to collect all of them. One point that I must mention is that the challenges also vary in terms of difficulty - some will be easy, others normal or difficult - and each will have from 1 to 3 ski passes as a reward if you complete the challenges. Some challenges will be based on time, or not missing a gate in parkour, while others will be on points (tricks). That’s the game in a nutshell.

What makes this game special to me is that the developers have managed to bring together the essence of this great winter sport with stunning surroundings to discover, entertaining gameplay with tight controls, and having the feel of a casual game with enough variations to keep you wanting more.

In addition to the super-tight controls, what impressed me the most was the feel of the speed while your character is going downhill. I wasn’t expecting that fluidity at all with a top-down perspective; it was definitely a big plus for me. Another point I liked is that the tricks are not overcomplicated. There are 7 tricks in total. It’s enough, and you will miss a fair few of them even if they are easy to action. It’s all about the landing for the tricks. For the parkours, it’s all about tight turns or the right sway. It is so much fun because the controls are so good.

In terms of the camera angles, it’s mostly fine, but I did find it awkward every now and then, depending on the direction I was coming from toward the start of new challenges. It felt that I was losing my bearing, and that sensation was more prominent while moving, but as soon as I stood still, the camera seemed to rectify itself. The other issue I encountered was when I opened the map view. Most of the time, I could see where the active challenges were and the location of the stars where you can find new challenges for ski passes. But in some instances, I just had numbers, and the stars disappeared from the map. Quite odd, to be frank! It was playable, but I had no way to find where the potential passes or events were located, and I had to thoroughly explore the level to find them. This situation occurred a few times after loading a saved game and using different computers. Of course, that might be an issue with the Steam cloud and nothing else. Nonetheless, it is annoying when that happens.

Stunning graphics and a soundtrack compiled of 24 tracks to enjoy. Super tight controls and well-balanced gameplay combining exploration and enough challenges to keep you entertained for hours or to come back to when you feel like it.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands Steam Store Page