RATING: TBD
Pros: Amazing and immersive experience in first person mode, strong character customisation options, detailed world and excellent graphics.
Cons: For some the lack of objectives may be a little boring, the game fall short in must played in first person mode and without the Oculus Rift it may have a much shorter shelf life.
We recently got a chance to sit down and play the free to play free skiing MMO SNOW from developers Poppermost, a new company looking to push out many adrenaline sport themed games focusing on realistic graphics and gameplay mechanics. Snow is currently in Alpha and is their flagship title, players can explore a number of open maps to ski down a variety of standard routes or go off piste to find out their own lines as they careen through dense forests, over huge rocky outcrop's and even over a log cabins, waterfalls and a hydro dam. Whilst the game has its fair share of incomplete features and bugs right now we gave it a test drive to see what was on offer.
When starting out players have a pretty wide selection of items to customise their character, in the ski shop you can pick up masks, helmets, jerseys, skis and all manner of other apparel with real world brands required for your time on the slopes. Whilst the game primarily focuses on providing a sense of realism to the experience it is in the shop that we see it go a little off point with the introduction of knights helmets, top hats and other headwear that we are assured isn't suitable for skiing down a mountain (we had to bring in the experts on that one as we've never been skiing before).
Once you are ready to hit the slopes players get to choose to play Alone or Together, if playing Alone then as it sounds you have the entire map to yourself, we can only presume that Together is a more multiplayer public map but unfortunately the feature was not accessible (as was the case with other features such as the rankings and events feature), seemingly you can join or host your own "room" for players to join.
There are currently three available maps, at least those that we could play, which consisted of a single ski jump area (though you could still ski past the boundaries to go exploring), an extreme skiing obstacle course filled with all manner of ramps and rails to perform tricks on and the main mountain map "Sialia". For Sialia you have a variety of locations around the map that you can spawn in, said to be around 8 km² and having over 20 unique areas handcrafted for players, the different spawn locations really help players to get around and check out the different locations. One such location is also at the bottom end of the mountain with more ramps and rails, emphasizing this sporty element to skiing.
Due to the emphasis on stunts and obstacles our expectations of Snow were in the lines of such classic games series' as Cool Boarders and SSX Tricky , where players could perform various tricks as they headed down an open course, finding some unique alternate routes along the way and performing insane stunt after insane stunt. At first whilst playing in third person mode we were trying to perform stunts managing one simple rotation or flip we initially figured we weren't powering up our moves long enough, or didn't know the correct controls (no way to check the controls in game and we actually had to find a PDF through their Steam hub). We were wrong; this is not what the game is about. This is not what the game is about at all.
The game is pegged at being a realistic freestyle winter sports MMO, so the tricks and stunts that we could perform had to be within the realms of realism, unfortunately as we were expecting something different it left us a little deflated and from then on the game felt a little bit boring. Whilst the elements of skiing from the top of a mountain, finding your own routes down to the bottom, coming across hidden scenes and dashing through dense tree lines can be fun for a little while it started to feel a little bit samey. Whilst there is undoubtedly near infinite different "lines" where players can create their own paths that they can execute a stunt or two, we didn't really see the appeal of doing the same thing over and over. There are no objectives in the game, stunts are held back due to realism, and there are only three maps; honestly it feels like there's not enough content to keep players entertained. Even with the open sandbox exploration the further afield we went the more obvious it became that there was less attention to detail spent (even to the point where the outlying trees were more cardboard cutout like, unlike the trees near the starting areas) though presumably this is just an Alpha issue as the game is more than capable and offers some pretty stunning graphics at times using the Crytek engine (the game is developed for both PC and PS4).
Still, with all this in mind "exploration" and "sandbox" wasn't really the feeling we were getting, we have no doubt the most players would play the game feeling that there is very little to do, even if they do find it entertaining to try and make their lines/routes down a mountain longer and find out every possible lift and dip to eke out a quick grab or spin. The whole game left us quite unimpressed and underwhelmed.
Then we switched to first person mode.
Now we saw what all the fuss was about. Starting in third person mode as the default camera angle is the worst thing that the developers have done with the game, this game was built for first person mode and suddenly the mad dashes down a mountainside cutting up past a rocky outcrop, or feeling your butt cheeks clench as you pass between two trees, made us realise this game was actually really, really impressive. When in first person we could hear the wind howling in our headset as we started to pick up speed at the top of the mountain, our smiles grew wider as our hearts beat more quickly, it was a very odd feeling to feel that excited whilst playing. This was no game. This was no freestyle sandbox exploration MMO. This wasn't a weak version of SSX Tricky. This was a skiing simulator that immersed you in the world, put you on the slopes and gave you a taster of the adrenaline pumping action where suddenly finding your own lines, gaps and little jumps becomes a hell of a lot more exciting and interesting.
Then we have to remember that Snow was developed for the Oculus Rift, and not since we saw EVE Valkyrie have we wished we had one of the VR headsets available to try out this game. We were immersed just with our standard monitor and we can only imagine how amazing it would feel to play the game with the Rift, subsequently putting Snow high up on our list of games will be sure to get when we finally get the hardware. With or without an Oculus Rift, Snow is definitely worth the experience.
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