The death of the SSX franchise, as well as Ubisoft’s Steep‘s unfortunate lack of success, have resulted in the actual death on skiing and snowboard-themed games in modern consoles. In fact, if it wasn’t for the NHL series, and the odd time a freaking curling game dropped on the Switch, there wouldn’t be any winter sports games at all. This is the reason why Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders caught my attention almost immediately. Finally, a brand new winter sports game. Even if it wasn’t exactly something akin to SSX or 1080 Avalanche, that was already a cause for celebration. So let’s talk about this brand new winter-themed title whilst I write this review in the middle of Brazilian summer.

Keen-eyed viewers will find the Lonely Mountains name familiar and realise that Snow Riders is the second game on a now-ongoing series; the first game in the franchise, Lonely Mountains: Downhill, came out in 2019, and was biking-based, whilst retaining a very similar gameplay loop to this one. Both of them are downhill sports games, with the simple objective of going from point A to point B as quickly as possible. The difference lies, obviously enough, on each of those games’ themes.

Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is all about skiing. You start off at the top of a mountain, and you need to venture through some shockingly complex and well-designed courses in order to reach the end goal. How you reach that goal is actually up to you, as there are multiple pathways, as well as some well-hidden shortcuts that take advantage of how well you’ve mastered the game’s controls. By yourself, the game is a race against the clock, with additional challenges thrown at you in order to spice things up, ironically enough. With other players, this becomes a straightforward racing game. Or as straightforward as a skiing game can be, of course.

The controls are a bit confusing at first, but the game does a pretty good job at teaching you some of its mechanics. You will need to learn how to properly steer against the default isometric perspective, as well as pay attention with the different kinds of jumps you can perform. At times, you need to do a long jump; other times, a shorter jump is a better solution to save up some precious seconds. Finally, you will need to remove the natural mental barrier everyone has: that thought that braking hinders your speed. Considering how levels are designed, you will need to properly learn how to perform sharp turns in order to avoid crashing. Now THAT will result in wasting your time.

When playing by yourself, Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders wants you to go down these mountain tracks as quickly as possible, as well as trying to avoid crashing as much as you can. You will only be able to unlock other (beautifully designed) mountains by being borderline perfect at your slope descent skills, making Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders feel oddly demanding and difficult to unlock its admittedly small amount of content. You can freely access any mountain at any time on Zen mode, but there are no challenges or incentives in this mode. It’s there for you to chill. Pun just moderately intended.

This game suffers from a paultry amount of content, as you can see. It will live or die by the amount of people populating its multiplayer servers. Whilst fun, the solo modes are brief and either too shallow or too difficult. When it comes to multiplayer, options vary a bit more, but most of the modes revolve around racing against groups of people. Even if you can perform tricks, they’re here mostly to spice the visuals and give you some achievements. Don’t expect to earn points by performing a flip or a grab.

I did not play this game’s predecessor, so I’m not exactly sure if the folks at Megagon Industries patch their games after launch with additional content. I hope they do, at least in this case. The amount of unlockables isn’t small, but they are mostly cosmetic items for ultra low poly avatars. It’s not exactly the greatest incentive, especially since each avatar looks minuscule when compared to the gorgeous mountain vistas which comprise most of Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders’s graphical presentation.

I really enjoyed Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders‘ core premise, and I honestly think this game has a lot of potential… as long as it is able to maintain its servers filled up for the foreseeable future. It’s a really fun racing game, set in a unique locale for today’s standards, but considering its paultry amount of content and dangerously barren single player campaign, it will live or die based on its multiplayer population. Considering it’s coming out at launch on Gamepass, that won’t exactly be an issue, at least at first; I just want to see how well the developers will be able to keep their playerbase entertained in the long term.

Graphics: 8.5 A perfect mixture between ultra-low-poly characters and admittedly pretty mountains to explore.	Gameplay: 8.5 Once you get used to the initially confusing steering and jumping mechanics, everything will feel like second nature.
Sound: 6.0 There isn’t any semblance of music. You’ll mostly hear the sound of your skis sliding over snow… and the occasional sound of you crashing on a nearby rock.	Fun Factor: 6.5 A beautiful game, which can either be chill (no pun intended) and relaxing on Zen Mode, or stupidly challenging on Single Player. It suffers from a paultry amount of content, though. It will live or die by the amount of people populating its multiplayer servers.
Final Verdict: 7.5

Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is available now on Xbox Series S/X and PC.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.

A copy of Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders was provided by the publisher.