Lonely Mountains Downhill

Review

There is one thing that none of us ever remembers; our first steps, and hence our first experience with equilibrium. The second thing that I personally don’t remember (maybe you have some recollection for yourself) is the first time I put my butt on this thing with two big wheels - one at the front, one at the back – and two additional smaller wheels for extra support. Yes, I am talking about my first bike. In this case, to prove that I actually did it, I have incredible footage of the event, as my Dad’s second passion (after trains) was filming; I must have been 4 or 5 years old.

Bikes have always been a good means of exercise, and there are several specific sports involving good ol’ human leg-power: Endurance Cycling (with events like the Tour de France), Speed Cycling (or little Nascar events, as I like to call them) where cyclists go as fast as they can on a loop track for a few laps, and Mountain Biking, which consists of going down a mountain as fast as you can on narrow and difficult tracks. Lucky you! You are going to experience the last on the list, in Lonely Mountains Downhill.

Lonely Mountains Downhill is a bike-racing game developed by Megagon Industries and published by Thunderful Publishing on the 24 of October 2019 on the Steam platform.

The game consists of 4 mountains which each have four tracks to discover. Each of these tracks has four levels of difficulty. In Explorer, there are no specific challenges to complete; your goal is simply to reach the finish line. I really like this mode as you can explore side-tracks and see if they are a shorter route to the finish line. In the Beginner mode there are 3 challenges to complete, while the Expert mode has 4. These challenges are based on time, as well as how often your cyclist falls of his/her bike. There is a fourth mode, but at this stage I can’t comment as I have not successfully cleared the first two mountain expert modes.

The gameplay is fabulous and unforgiving.  I would classify this little beauty as a hardcore game, as you will fall off your bike many, many times over. You might ride off a cliff, hit a tree or rock, or fall into deep water. The good news is that each track has segments. So far, the maximum number of segments per track has been 8. Each time you reach a segment the game will automatically save. You will restart from that point if you fall from your bike before you reach the next segment.

As mentioned, the gameplay is just fabulous, and I really like the physics. Even as you see your biker in a third eye perspective, you can still feel the speed, the brakes and of course the falls when they occur. It is a challenging game to say the least, and hardcore players will definitely get a kick out of this one! For players like myself who enjoy a challenge, you might need to take a few breaks between each of your gaming sessions, as you might find smoke coming out each of your five facial orifices making you sweat uncontrollably.

I really like the fact that you can customise both your bike and your characters; always a bonus!

Great low poly graphics and amazing physics. The controls are sharp, but I prefer to play the game with my Xbox One Controller rather than the mouse and keyboard. It is a hardcore type of game and you might feel frustrated on more than one occasion.