Lonely Mountains: Downhill Video Review Transcript:
Lonely Mountains: Downhill isn’t an easy game to play. As someone who has never taken a bicycle off of a road, on purpose anyway, there is an entire sport of biking that I know absolutely nothing about. Luckily, Lonely Mountains: Downhill doesn’t require the player to have any sort of mountain biking background to enjoy, and flourish within, the game’s challenging trails.
Players start with a basic bike and some cosmetic customization options for their biker. Completing trail challenges gradually unlocks new bikes with different stats, along with additional cosmetic options for the biker and their gear.
Challenges involve completing a trail within a certain time frame, or without crashing a certain number of times. Both types of challenges can be difficult, but I like that each caters to a different play style. One favors players who enjoy racing the clock and nailing the perfect turns and landings to shave milliseconds off their best records; the other challenge rewards careful players who take the trails slow and steady.
The trails are divided into mountains. There are currently four mountains, and each mountain has different trails that feature their own unique difficulties and visual style. I have the first two mountains unlocked, and the difference between the two is immediately evident. One is green and grassy, and the other is more autumn-looking. The visual variation helps each trail feel distinct, even when they take place on the same mountain.
However, the visuals can be a bit of a nuisance. Many times I’d wreck because a tree in the foreground blocked my view during a turn. I understand that it’s meant to feel immersive, but having an object limit my line of sight can feel like a cheap trick meant to toughen the difficulty. Not that the game needs to be any harder.
For the most part, the physics hold strong and only punish me if I landed too hard, or flat out wrecked. Occasionally something weird would cause me to wreck, like bumping into a rock at just the right angle, but that was rare. Lonely Mountains Downhill does a great job with reining in the difficulty and then slowly increasing it the further into the game the player gets.
By the second mountain I was tackling trails that would have made me faint of anxiety had they been in the first trail I tried. I saw my skills grow and going back to previous trails I found myself confident that I could complete the challenges that required a bit more precision or control.
Lonely Mountains: Downhill is an easy game for me to recommend. You’ll want to bring a controller and you may need to tinker with the controls at first, but once I finished the first few trails, I was hooked. Lonely Mountains: Downhill is available now for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. A Nintendo Switch release is coming soon.
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This game was reviewed using a retail copy provided to Epic Brew by the publisher.
