More people are more fun.
Skiing is a niche sport. It's not enough to have enough snow near your home, and all kinds of supporting equipment are not cheap, but in video games, ski-themed works obviously have a higher appearance rate than other more unpopular sports. From the mobile end to the host end, from the 2D plane to the 3D stereoscopic, whether it is produced by a small factory or a large factory, ski-themed games are really not few. For example, the classic "Aalto Adventure" series and Ashoka's "Ski AAA masterpiece" "Extreme Peak".
Alpine Adventure: Wonderland is a "medium-sized" work. Compared to the classic ski game "Aalto Adventure", it has more snowboards with different operating skills, and players can also make more details of the action. Compared with "Extreme Peak", its content richness is slightly inferior to the latter's large number of levels and special gameplay.
But "medium in size" doesn't stop Alpine Adventure: Wonderland from being a fun ski game — just fun, though. Although the flattened model and the style of the snow scene are quite compatible, its special and fixed top-down view, combined with a map of unclear depths, greatly affects the player's operation experience.
The use of a "God perspective" similar to a "God perspective" in 3D sports games is nothing new. There is a good quality small-volume mountain bike downhill game "Lonely Mountain Downhill", which is how to play. But the problem with Alpine Adventure: Wonderland is that while both use flat graphics, the alpine environment of Lonely Mountain Rappel gives the ground more color and provides the player with enough recognition, while the map of Alpine Adventure: Wonderland is a white expanse of snow - it is difficult for players to judge with the naked eye that their head is from the ground, can flip once, or twice, or ... Half a time.
For games like games that sell with fancy aerial movements, the difficulty of judging altitude is almost a fatal blow — you don't even know how many laps are right for the turn, let alone backflips and more difficult sideflips.
Fortunately, although this problem affects the player's gaming experience, it does not cancel out all the positive feedback, and Alpine Adventure: Wonderland still has its advantages, and many more.
Although not the Ultimate Peak-style adjustable first-person and shoulder-crossing third-person, this game is still a true 3D game, which can be confirmed by the fact that the player can pan 90 degrees to "brake the plate". Thanks to the 3D gameplay, players are able to do more fancy moves. Development team Toppluva AB adapted the grab steering and grab drift into a simple one-click response, without the need for complex moves such as fighting games, and people can also play their own figure skating on the snow.
Under the lower operating threshold, the pleasing snow scenery and the ski traces that express the beauty of the curve naturally become the biggest features of this work. If the player can still play some tricks when vacating, it is meimei's mother who opens the door for meimei - mei has arrived home.
What can not match the beauty of the map and the action is that in addition to visually difficult to show the difference in terrain height, the operation may not be satisfactory.
When using the gamepad to play this game, whenever I make a preparatory action before taking off, I will always be troubled because the joystick cannot be smoothly connected in the "jumping position" and "aerial action", and the two operations that should be as silky as the snow marks behind the character always feel a sense of unexplained obstruction. The main problem is that after the player makes a "jumping pose", the double stick must be quickly reversed to connect to the subsequent aerial movements.
But the problem is that when the player is eager to pinch the time to microseconds to predict the delayed operation, the extra "hand shaker lever back to the right" out of thin air is too much to affect the operation feel, which is a problem that cannot be solved with micro-manipulation. As for why it came about, I had the answer after I tried the development team's earlier game, Grand Mountain Adventure: Snowboard Premiere, which was launched earlier on the mobile side.
The Alpine Adventure series was originally designed with touchscreen operation as a priority, without regard to the control under the physical joystick.
Touch-enabled Grand Mountain Adventure: Snowboard Premiere
Compared with the previous snowboard Premiere, the operation of "Alpine Adventure: Wonderland" is basically not updated, which leads to the "joystick back to the right" that does not need to think at all when the mobile phone takes off the touch screen, and after switching to the PC side, the operation cannot be quickly connected.
Of course, if you don't care about the optimization problem that disappears, you may be less than a second away, and the player can still play smoothly. As a work with the theme of extreme sports, this work belongs to the standard "low threshold, high ceiling".
Most of the ski-themed games are easy to learn and difficult to learn, which is very realistic. In the same type of game, "Aalto Adventure" designed a wingsuit flying mini-game to complement the gameplay, and "Extreme Peak" has high-quality performance and fancy actions with any combination of front and rear hands plus front and rear blades - although the volume, operation and gameplay of the two games are completely different, they are based on the theme of skiing, and have designed their own game features.
The same is naturally true of Alpine Adventure: Wonderland.
It piled up the ice box court with a dozen maps of enough tubes, as well as various explicit or hidden challenges. Although the levels on different maps are generally based on "brushing points" and "racing", there are some special challenges that make people shine. In Dalarna, Sweden, for example, players can challenge streamline records or try "skating" on a huge ice lake.
Regarding the important acceleration mechanism, Alpine Adventure: Wonderland did not drastically change anything, but chose the decent left and right rocker acceleration, the acceleration of the air landing and the acceleration of the drift over the corner, and did not try to add a similar "close contact obstacle" acceleration, or a more jumpy prop play. But this game still has an interesting way to accelerate that it is worth carrying out single-handedly - hitting people to accelerate.
In addition to the regular acceleration methods mentioned in the appeal, the player is able to hit the surrounding NPCs with their flesh or poles while skiing. The attacked NPCs will cooperatively curse a dirty word, and then collapse to the ground, offering a period of instantaneous acceleration to the hitter. This experience, like the Berserker Creed or the big bald head of "all kills is also a stealth", and with a unique snowfield thug cool feeling "I came to ski, in order to prevent 'torpedoes', first dry the entire field of people, it should be very reasonable."
While I'm really not satisfied with some of the problems with the operation, you should be able to find that these problems are based on a sufficiently immersive gaming experience, and I still recommend this niche game. Not to mention the high-quality atmosphere creation of this game, just the nonsense contrast between "violent skiing" and beautiful snow scenery is already worth trying for players interested in skiing, which is the reason why this game has only 64 user reviews on Steam, but the praise rate is as high as 93%.
When the 2022 Winter Olympics began, skiing had a brief moment of popularity on social media, but eventually faded away. In reality, skiing in the double threshold of venue and cost, stopped a lot of people interested in trying, but in the game, you can still feel the joy of skiing without leaving home - whether it is snowboard or double board, with a few boards can "go to heaven", it is indeed very attractive.
In this regard, although the volume of "Alpine Adventure: Wonderland" is small, the gameplay in the middle and late stages is somewhat repetitive, but players can still constantly challenge new levels, explore hidden challenges in the map, and fight against themselves who were born in the "ghost system" and are constantly getting stronger.
For a game of this size, it is enough to provide this "small and beautiful" experience.