Developer: Denis Lapiner
Publisher: Denis Lapiner
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Mad Snowboarding – Review
It’s been quite some time since snowboard games were mainstream titles. Their reign was supreme during the PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64 era, where most of these games had a real arcade feeling or their own fun quirks to ensure a very amusing multiplayer experience. Sadly, these games quickly faded into the background making it seem like they would never reappear and become distant but fun memories. Mad Snowboarding does an attempt to take you on a fun trip down memory snow slope, but while it has potential, it tends to feel rather unfinished in its current state.
Story
As Mad Snowboarding is all about an arcade experience that thrives on player generated content, there is no story to be found. Those who want a bit more might take some comfort into the fact that you can unlock several amusing characters like a werewolf, an ice giant, a monkey and so on, thus you can make up your own background story as you go. While a game such as this one doesn’t need a story to be fun, it would have been nice to have some actual background on the characters themselves.
Graphics
By today’s standards the game doesn’t look all that fancy and feels like it was ported from a mobile device. While the different characters each have their own fun quirks and matching snowboards, the environments are rather bland, simplistic and void of any life forms or other fun clutter that could have livened up the place. Cliffs and ramps seem to be copy pasted, rather than have a sense of diversity. Even though the graphical quality isn’t top notch, this game would be so much more appealing if some extra items were added concerning variety and sights to see. Of course, seeing most of the levels are created by players, it’s also their responsibility to add a bit of life to their levels, but it would have been nice if the starting levels would have set the proper example. All of that being said, the actual backdrop on the horizon looks quite spiffy and beautiful.
The feeling of it being a mobile port gets enforced even more when looking at the rather cheap looking menus that the game throws at you, which simply scream ‘smartphone’ from start to finish. While these menus would look decent on your tablet, for a PC game such as this, they look like complete rubbish and none of the menus has any proper indication of what they do (while they end up being straightforward enough).
Sound
It seems as if Mad Snowboarding only has one track, which loops over and over again, but oddly enough it doesn’t really get annoying, even during longer playing sessions. You’ll be focusing more on finding the finish or landing your tricks properly, making the musical experience immediately drop to the background. The SFX are rather basic, but more than sufficient for what this game needs.
Gameplay
Mad Snowboarding is all about snowboarding, in a rather arcade create-your-own content setting. You’ll only occupy yourself with two things, namely racing to the finish or scoring points by performing cool tricks. If you’re not that handy with your snowboard, you can always start creating your own levels via the level editor, which in the end is pretty much half of this game’s content.
Seeing we called the game arcade, the controls prove to be very easy to learn, unrealistic but fun enough to mess around with. Performing tricks is simply done by changing direction midair or by grabbing onto your board and then change directions. This all proves easy enough, but the grinding mechanics are rather horrible as there is no real ‘grind’ button in the game that allows you to properly grind like in other similar titles, or even the old Tony Hawk games. While it’s advised to play with a controller, controlling the game with a keyboard works rather decently as well.
As stated above, the game runs solely on player generated content, which is rather scarce, uncontrolled and not always that qualitative at the moment. Seeing pretty much everyone can upload his or her items there are many levels which are purely rubbish, but there are also fun ones that are certainly worth checking out. Even though the game has been out for several months now, it perhaps would be best if the developer or a fixed team of creators would provide some monthly fun qualitative content to plow through.
The level editor itself is straightforward when it comes to what you can do with it, but it takes some time getting used to how everything works. The menus are again rather basic, but they do the trick. The only thing that could use some tweaking is a better user interface but mostly the controls that allow you to hover around the map, as they feel a bit sluggish.
While so far things didn’t sound that impressive, the game actually shines when you invite a few of your friends over and start playing versus or co-op. Even though the game doesn’t really have a goal, it’s fun to download some random maps (or create your own funny ones) and see who comes out on top.
Conclusion
Even though Mad Snowboarding didn’t win us over completely due to the rather basic graphical prowess and the lack of supported content, it did amuse us in terms of multiplayer fun. This game certainly has potential and hopefully the player base will grow further, which would add a lot to the overall content that is spread throughout the community but as it stands now, there are a lot of rough edges that still need to be trimmed.
Mad Snowboarding - Review,
No Comments