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Review

Jan 21, 2025

Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders Review

Lights Off
4 Awesome
Retails for: $24.99
We Recommend: $19.99
  • Developer: Megagon Industries
  • Publisher: Megagon Industries
  • Genre: Indie, Racing, Sports
  • Released: Jan 21, 2025
  • Platform: Windows, Xbox Series X|S
  • Reviewed: Windows

Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders takes everything that made Lonely Mountains: Downhill so good, trades BMX bikes for skis, and then transports players to snow-covered slopes to be a satisfying follow-up. The act of playing the game is transcendent, often harrowing as you’ll be jumping massive chasms and gaps while avoiding rocks, trees, and ice patches. Megagon Industries really nails the sense of speed and dread as you’re careening down the face of a mountain. Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is once again a brilliant adventure of embracing gravity and defying the odds thanks to the impeccable controls to be another gem of a game.

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Snow Riders largely plays the same as its predecessor. You’ll pick a trail, a slope, then your gear and you’re off to your destination. The game has a good tutorial level that ensures you know the basics. The changes involve the fact that you’re in snow the whole time, and you’ll have to learn how to navigate with skis. The controls will be familiar to returning players as you have your choice between: screen-based steering or left/right steering. In the last game, I switched to left/right, but here I stayed to screen-based steering. While I would get turned around or lose my direction, I ended up preferring this overall.

The single-player mode is just solo progression and challenges, but there’s a Zen Mode, too. It’s the other single-player mode with all trails and slopes unlocked from the start, allowing you to experience everything the game has to offer, practice unrestricted, even allowing for you to place respawn points at your leisure, and otherwise play the game without a timer running. It lives up to the name, and can make you better at practice tougher spots of the slopes that keep you from progressing.

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There are three mountains to conquer, with four slopes each. Each slope has a blue and a black slope. The black slopes are always locked, until certain requirements are met. All that adds up to is 24 levels to play through, and their varying difficulty will have you returning them often to beat best times, or not crash your way through a level. In a lot of ways this is reminiscent of the Trials games in terms of progression and challenges you have to beat in order to unlock the next thing.

Tannenstein is the first mountain, its high cliffs and jumps will have you master the short and long jump as you carve a path to the finish line. Monte Guanaco has lots of ice and melted paths to keep an eye out for. And lastly, Sierra Gelida is snow-covered high desert that seems impossibly high and treacherous to traverse. All levels across all mountains and slopes have multiple paths to find shortcuts and more optimal ways down, often found by accident. It’s really fun to experiment through trial-and-error, and find something that shaves precious seconds off your total time in order to complete a particular challenge. The numerous pathways available to the player seem so much more than what you could do in Lonely Mountains: Downhill.

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Three challenges must be completed to unlock the black slopes for each trail. Levels are scored by time spent, amount of crashes, and lastly a combination of time spent and crashes but with a reduced count. Thankfully you only need to complete two of these challenges in order to unlock the next slope of a trail. This in it of itself can be a bit daunting because the game’s difficulty does ramp up, making you rerun the same thing until you get it.

There’s lots of styles and ways to customize your rider. In gear, you can customize the outfit, helmet, accessory, backpack, paint job, lower body, and upper body. You can also customize the body from its shape, hair, beard, voice, and skin tone. You can even customize the grabs the rider performs on long jumps. The aforementioned customization items are almost all blocked by levels you have to attain by progressing in the game. It does create goals for you, but can often be more of a barrier.

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There is multiplayer, you can race solo or on teams across all of the same tracks for some real competition besides the leaderboards. The game even supports private matches so you can have some epic back and forth races with friends, and no strangers.

Problems from the prior game remain. Often I got stuck behind objects I couldn’t see through, and since the camera doesn’t rotate, there was no way for me to navigate my way out. If the game made some objects transparent or some other way to get you unstuck, would be good. Great runs were ruined by this, and the fact it remains six years later in a new game is disappointing.

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Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders runs superbly, I had no issues with it. The game looks better with depth of field turned off, allowing you to see off into the distance and see how high up you really are.

I feel like the audio takes center stage over the visuals. Like the first game, you’ll have no music or ambient audio except for the skis crunching through the snow and maybe the occasional yell from the player when they smack into rocks or trees. Even in the standard mode, there’s an odd quiet while you make your way down the mountain.

My PC Specs:

– Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
– Intel Core i9 13900K @ 5.8GHz
– ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360 ARGB AIO Liquid CPU Cooler
– G.SKILL TRIDENT Z5 6000MHZ 64GB (32×2) DDR5 RAM
– ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GDDR6X
– WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (4 TB)
– LG UltraGear 34GP950B-G (21:9 Ultrawide @ 3440×1440)

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Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is the quintessential winter escape, the tight controls paired with breath-taking vistas are this game’s bread and butter. While progression can feel slow, playing the game is anything but. I am looking forward to what more will be coming to the game in terms of updates, but for what’s here at launch, is a careful balance of challenging but fair slopes. Simply put, Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is gnar, top to bottom.

A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes