Slopecrashers Review

Slopecrashers is a unique take on the snowboarding genre as it borrows ideas from Nintendo’s Mario Kart series. While the goal is to ultimately reach the finish line, you’ll able to pick up defensive and passive items as you ride down the slopes to either allow you temporarily disable the competition or give you some extra boost.

One of the mechanics that differentiates this from other snowboarding games is the option to turn downhill riding into laps. Once you reach the bottom of the hill, you’ll jump into a ski lift which will bring you back up so you can go another turn. Also each map is also available in three types of races: the first half of the hill, the second half of the hill and the long ass ride from top to bottom.

There’s a handful of different game modes you can choose from. There’s a Campaign/career where you need to earn top 3 position in order to move forward. This also includes a boss fight once you’ve completed all races. Grand Prix is basically a championship mode like in Mario Kart; you have a few Cups containing a handful of races to get through and win. Arcade mode is where you can just freely play; choose your character, race, board, rules and just go.

During Career mode, each race will also have a handful of optional objectives to complete to get additional XP; such as using the boost a set amount of times or performing specific tricks. The boost meter fills up progressively as you hit enemies and perform tricks. The little nuisance with it is that you have to use it all at once, you can’t use a little here or there. But it’s not much of an issue as it’s incredibly easy to fill the meter.

As you successfully go through your career mode, you’ll unlock new cosmetic items and new boards for the characters. While most of the time you’ll be able to use items, some races will have the items disabled offering a more racing based gameplay rather than focusing on taking out others (trust me, they will gun for you). The little addendum is that without the attack items, it makes things way too easy.

The game looks fine; it offers a cartoonish visual that’s more appealing to kids than anyone else. Each character is a different animal such as parrot, lemur, raccoon; just to name a few. They look fine and cutesy, but limited with details; obviously it’s not meant to be realistic. Also each map has a unique theme from the simplistic snowy mountain to a bright neon playground to ride through. The soundtrack is an incredibly boring, stock cartoon-y soundtrack. No to see (or hear?) here.

The game’s biggest problem is how cheap the A.I. is. While it is expected for the computer controlled riders to target you along with the other riders with weapons, this is just incredibly ridiculous. You can easily get hit 5-7 times in a row by enemy projectile giving you barely any chances to catch to the top 3. As you’d expect, it also kills any fun this game could offer, even on the Casual difficulty setting. Also, some races, especially with multiple laps, can take like 10 minutes to get through, but unlike other games such as SSX 3, it feels boring; notwithstanding the fact that you constantly get pounded by enemy projectile.

As a fan of snowboarding games, I was actually looking forward to playing this. It got on my radar shortly before release and I was excited for a new game in the dormant genre to surface. Unfortunately, it’s a disappointment. While I appreciate the uniqueness of mixing games like SSX with some aspect of Mario Kart, it falls flat. Not only because long races feel long and not fun, but also because the A.I. is merciless. I can understand making things challenging, but even on the Casual setting, it’s frustrating and cheap. Unless they fix the game’s overall balancing, I cannot recommend Slopecrashers; especially considering that it’s £14.49 and you can get SSX 3, a near masterpiece, for £9.99. Pass.