If you’ve got the itch for something a bit chillier in the slowly warming days, you can grab your board and coast down some slopes in Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands.
As winter has recently taken its annual leave once again, it’s certainly not hard to feel a bit of regret for some of the things we didn’t or weren’t quite able to get to do during its stay. For me, one of the many things that I think about when it comes to winter is snow, and with snow comes, among other things, snowboarding.
Enter ‘Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands’, developed by Toppluva AB and published by Microids. It is a very casual sports game, since the game features a pair of sports, that being snowboarding and skiing, as its main theme. However, I find it very important to emphasize the casual aspect of the game, as it is one of the game’s main draws, I feel. There is a multiplayer mode, where you can compete with your friends if you do so desire, but that is not where the main feel of the game shines, I feel.
To begin with, Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands takes an overhead angle, looking down on you from the front. The controls are simple to learn and make for an easy experience to quickly jump into and start swinging once you’ve gotten your hands on a copy of the game. You simply tilt the movement stick from side to side, swaying back and forth to swing your way down snow-covered slopes. You can jump, tilt the sticks to pull off tricks, and of course, slow your speed and skid to a stop.
As I said, the controls are simple. There are no other mechanics to learn outside of those simple basics, which is far from a bad thing. Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands takes its simple controls and hones them to a point, focusing on what it can do with something very simple. It was almost refreshing, really, to have a simple set of things I could do, and needing to figure out how to master them on my own, with nothing else being added or changed about them. At the very least, this proved that not every game needs to have changing or evolving mechanics to be fun.
Though, to be honest, if you’re not in the mood for something downbeat, then this might not actually be the right game for you. Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands has a lot of phrases that I would like to use to describe it, but ‘fast paced’ is certainly not one of them. Even on the later slaloms and various challenges that the game threw my way, I never felt like I was doing anything very quickly, even if there was a time limit I was aiming for.
No, Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands didn’t feel fast. I would rather describe it as ‘methodical’, but in an engaging way. The environments were very peaceful and incredibly lovely to look at, and when paired with the laid-back sound design and music, I felt it easy to simply lean back in my chair and focus on figuring out how to complete my current trial. Much of my time on the game was spent figuring out how to properly streamline my trips down the portion of the mountain I was currently on.
Speaking of mountains, they are the forefront of Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands’ progression. There are twelve mountains in the game, acting as miniature open worlds, and you start with only one unlocked, that being Hirschalm. Each mountain contains a different number of ski passes, some with more and some with fewer, which are used to unlock other parts of the mountain, and eventually the next mountain in the line.
Each mountain requires the same number of ski passes to unlock, with the only stipulation being that they be obtained on the prior mountain. I do wish some of the later mountains had larger ski pass requirements, as a bit of an incentive to purposefully mess around on earlier mountains for a little longer. Plus, I found it a bit strange, primarily because later mountains can have upwards of one hundred passes to work with. Collecting fifteen passes on a mountain with eighty-plus means that, while I did like spending time on the slopes, I didn’t have much reason other than personal fulfillment to do so.
Ski passes are collected in various ways, though the main way will be by completing challenges. They were previously mentioned and serve as the main obstacle you will face during your time on the slopes. The challenges in Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands range from things like races, in which you simply need to make it from one point to another in a proper slalom, to things like distance checks, where you need to cover as much distance down the side of the mountain as possible in a certain amount of time. In addition, certain challenges are hidden around the mountain, which can be found by approaching them if you happen to notice them dotted along the landscape.
Certain challenges have differing amounts of goals to aim for, and each goal gives you a ski pass. The number of goals can go from anywhere as low as one to as many as four. However, a good portion of Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands’ challenges will feature a simple, three-goal structure: bronze, silver, and gold.
As ski passes are vital to progressing through the game, you’ll probably spend a lot of your time attempting and reattempting challenges. However, ski passes are also dotted around the mountainside, which act as fun little rewards for those who favor a bit more exploration.
The only real gripe I have about Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands is a bit small and nitpicky, but is still a gripe nonetheless. What you see upon starting the game is more or less exactly what you get, quite literally. There is little customization available to the player, with your main form of that sort of thing being the choice between whether you prefer skis or snowboards. As far as I found, there was no mechanical difference in place for the two of them, meaning the choice is purely aesthetic.
I think that Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands could have done with just a touch of customization as well. Your character is not very big, of course, but sometimes a change to the small splash of color you control is all you need to brighten up your experience that little bit more that you need. Again, this is far from game ruining, but in a game this simple, why not have a little aesthetic fun?
But, again, those are nitpicks. Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands is a simple but fulfilling game, good if you need some relaxing fun in the snow, if you can’t get into it yourself, for whatever reason may befall you.
And that’s going to be the end of our Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands review! If this piqued your interest, you can check out the official website here, as well as on Nintendo Switch and Steam.
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