Review | Slopecrashers - Crashing Through The Snow
Sometimes a game can be so fondly remembered that it winds up holding back the way we view an entire genre. Final Fantasy looms colossal over the JRPG, and every skateboarding game from now until the end of time will be judged by its proximity to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. A game can become so important that any other game with even surface-level similarities will draw comparison. With that in mind, I expected Slopecrashers to present a bit of a challenge to me. How can I look at this game, an arcade snowboarding title whose trailer promises air-defying stunts over massive hills made of white powder littered with big colourful arrows to follow and rails to grind, and ignore the impulse to compare it to… Well, if you’ve already worked through the short list of games I could be thinking of, you can see what my issue was. As it turns out, Slopecrashers is interested in doing very much its own thing, and if you come into it looking for the mechanical precision of an SSX title or the replayability of Snowboard Kids, you may find yourself dissatisfied. You might also be missing the forest for the trees. Or, like, the mountain for the snow.
I didn't get off to a great start with Slopecrashers. It took some effort (and a few crashes) to get the game running on the Steam Deck, a bit troubling at first considering how, at the time of writing, the game’s most recent store page news update proudly advertises it as “a FANTASTIC experience on the Deck.” Thankfully, once you get it to work, it remains solid. You won't see any stray frame drops or slowdowns even as racers, items, and particle effects fly across the screen.
Beyond the technicalities of its performance, while I’m ultimately pretty lukewarm on the game’s art direction, it’s definitely consistent. Everything is as it should be. The bug-eyed cartoon animals ragdoll around like chew toys and often spout what I can only describe as circus noises in lieu of voice lines, though there are still the occasional generic quips. It’s almost reaching a Crash Team Racing sort of charm, but in Slopecrashers something about the characters comes across as lifeless in a way that, at my most charitable, I could call an allusion to the hardware limitations of the game’s retro inspirations. It’s tough to say whether I wanted the game to reel in its eccentricity or get even weirder. As it stands, Slopecrashers’ characters are caught in an uncanny middle ground. Still, during gameplay the cast feels right at home racing down the game’s handful of colourful locales.
Speaking of those locales, the game’s setpieces — be they gliding through a shopping mall or riding alongside a waterfall — often impressed me. The trade-off here is that the environments didn’t feel particularly innovative. As I played I found myself thinking, “cool, the Maple Treeway level,” or, “oh sick, the Mercury City Meltdown level.” More than once was I reminded of Midway’s Cruis’n franchise. But Slopecrashers never took me somewhere unexpected.
While the game sticks to the tried-and-trues of the racing genre, it’s hard not to respect how well it nails the presentation of these settings. Disappointingly, for every few courses that wowed me, there was at least one that I managed to sleepwalk through, with nothing particularly eye-catching to grab my attention. The worst offenders were undoubtedly the first and final tracks in the game, which are just snowy mountains with nothing much else to say about them. The course selection reflects the game as a whole — a grab-bag of amusing moments, mired by inconsistency.
It’s difficult to engage with Slopecrashers’ single-player content, not only because it is genuinely hard but also because it's just not very fun. The trailer shows off a trick system that looks complex, but once you start playing you find it has all the depth of picking a direction and holding the left stick there for a while. Its character customization seems promising at first, but when you unlock your third bowtie in a row, it loses its lustre. The sizeable campaign mode gives the illusion of a packed game with tons of courses on offer, but in reality you're just looking at divvied-up chunks of the same seven tracks, repeated ad nauseam. There are some bonus challenges tucked into the campaign you won't find elsewhere in Slopecrashers. They feature the usual fare for this sort of game — hit X amount of boosts, shoot Y amount of targets. None of these are particularly compelling and they don't offer much incentive to trudge through the same courses again and again.
As for the game modes that receive the most focus in the campaign, I wasn’t loving my time there, either. Single-player racing events frustrate more often than not due to the game’s pool of items, dull in design but devastating in function. Taking clear inspiration from Snowboard Kids, many of the game’s most vicious weapons home in on their targets, making them difficult to dodge, and the quite honestly extreme penalty for being hit by some of the nastier ones — balloon item that targets its victim and suspends them in midair for several seconds, I’m looking at you — can kill any hope of winning a race. The final nail in the coffin is the ski lift animation that commonly plays between laps in a race, another cute homage to Snowboard Kids which, bafflingly, comes with a loading screen, killing any momentum — literal or figurative — a player may have accumulated. Easy to forgive in a game from 1998, not so much now.
The game’s score-based trick events feel a bit more fair, but are held back by the aforementioned simplicity of the trick system. Worse, the game’s courses — full of narrow paths surrounded by out-of-bounds zones — often make the prospect of grabbing some big airtime to pull off a trick simply not worth it, as frequently the camera would abandon me as I flung myself into a patch of land, indistinguishable from its surroundings, that the game had deemed a no-no zone.
As I mulled over the idea of just giving up on Slopecrashers, a thought occurred to me: Anyone who loves arcade snowboarding games enough to have Slopecrashers on their radar has likely played the rather spartan selection of genre classics so much that the memories of casual split-screen have faded away, replaced by maxed out savefiles and perfected routes. These beloved titles — SSX, Snowboard Kids, Cool Boarders, to name, well, basically all of them — undoubtedly have high skill ceilings and robust singleplayer modes to thank for their continued longevity, but just as important to their early success was their penchant for delivering unfiltered spectacle and reckless, high-octane multiplayer action, barreling down hills, smashing into walls, and screaming with friends the whole way through. As more and more “throwback” titles come out that focus on the technical mastery offered by games of an older generation, what harm is there in also paying tribute to those earlier days before we'd grinded our favourite games to min-maxed oblivion? I realised that I may not have been meeting Slopecrashers halfway.
Determined to find something to love in this game, I said to hell with the campaign, opened up the grand prix mode, and tried my best to embrace the chaos. I can't say the game miraculously won me over, but at the very least, it started making sense. Where I once saw a lack of depth, I now saw an intentionally casual experience. Slopecrashers isn’t about devising the perfect line. Of course not — that should’ve been obvious to me as soon as I saw the giant spinning item boxes littering the course. This game wasn’t made for you to stress about winning. It doesn’t have the tightest movement or the most intricate mechanics. Rather than get annoyed, I let the game just wash over me. The nice thing about the grand prix mode is it’s all unlocked from the get-go, so as far as I'm concerned a 7th place finish (and there were several 7th place finishes) is just as much a win as a 1st place one. Removed from the fear of failure the campaign brings with it, I was able to experiment more with the game’s mechanics. The paraglider the game gives you is a bit janky but still entertaining, and the rare moments where you can pull off something great with it are properly gratifying. If you can turn your brain just the slightest bit off, Slopecrashers starts to work.
Multiplayer was the final piece of the puzzle. Getting into a lobby with a friend was a bit of a nightmare (when has an indie release on Steam ever had an easy to use lobby system?) but once we figured it out, things were nice and stable the whole way through, even as strangers joined our game. This is clearly where Slopecrashers is meant to shine. When, during my time with the campaign, some Nickelodeon-looking CPU lemur freak hit me with the balloon item, I would think something along the lines of, “I hate you CPU Lemur why are you even here man literally go home dude get out of this game.” When a friend hits me with a balloon, it's still perhaps the foulest thing ever put in a video game, but somehow I have an easier time laughing it off. Early on, when I was still pathetically tryharding in the funny snowboarding game where you can be a penguin with a grappling hook, I rolled my eyes whenever I’d sail into an out-of-bounds zone nobody had warned me about. Watching a friend fall into the same trap as we raced together only made me laugh. In fact, it made us both laugh. We laughed a lot during our shared time with the game. The biggest laugh came when this friend pointed out to me just how little snow bothers to show up in many of the courses for what is ostensibly a game about snow. Slopecrashers is uncompromising in its vision, played out as that vision might be, with a dedication to its imagery that can't be held back by the semantics of how much “snow” there needs to be in a “snowboarding” game.
I came to appreciate Slopecrashers; not love it, but appreciate it. There's a cohesion to its oddball visual identity, and there's novelty in its extra movement mechanics — like the aforementioned paraglider — that will earn the game its share of fans. There are certainly still flaws. Those load times between laps are hard to forgive and multiplayer races can feel surprisingly lonely at times when players are spread far apart on any of the linear paths offered by intersections in courses. None of these issues could hold their own against the simple fact that we were having real, classic, old-school arcadey fun.
When we wrapped up our short session, I asked my friend, “Would you buy this game?” He said no, but he was glad to have played it. I thought of how many silly little arcade-style time killers I’d played in friends’ living rooms growing up. The kind of games that I probably wouldn’t spend a slot on my Christmas wishlist (the paycheck of childhood) on, but that I was still glad to have had the chance to play. There's a purity to Slopecrashers’ multiplayer fun. Unfortunately, after our session I was left alone. It was just me, my slightly levelled-up chicken, my slightly levelled-up chicken’s slightly levelled-up snowboard, and a campaign that I had no interest in returning to. The additional movement tools and bizarre alternatives to snowboards the game has on offer are nice, but after the five hours it took to unlock the admittedly pretty funny frying pan, I wasn’t eager to drag myself through unlocking the other ones. For that reason, Slopecrashers’ time on my hard drive is probably limited. Without any rewarding single-player modes, it's hard to imagine the game offering much in the way of replay value with its small selection of courses. Still, I had the experience the game was asking me to have. I managed to turn off the perfectionist so many other snowboarding games ask you to indulge, and was able to appreciate the zany, free-spirited party game that this is. I’d finally seen it for what it wanted to be.
Slopecrashers is a deeply unserious game. It's an unpolished, janky, weirdo-game that can often be aggravating if you look at it from the wrong angle. However, somewhere in that hectic, unrefined madness is a short little rollercoaster of a game that can leave you laughing and yelling with friends. You won’t be getting too much mileage out of its limited serving of courses, but it's as honest a vision of those turn-of-the-century arcade racing classics as any other.
Not the balloon item, though. The balloon item is evil.
