REVIEW : Lonely Mountains: Downhill (XBOX)
Lonely Mountains: Downhill is both tranquil and challenging. Deciding how to attach your solitary rider down one of the game’s pleasant mountains makes for an entrancing adventure. Likely, anyone who has ever ridden a mountain bike will have a visceral response to the action on screen, which smartly forgoes music for a nature soundtrack. The buttons are intuitive, but mastering the nuances of how to take a particular jump or turn on a given trail, and knowing when to accelerate, drift, brake, or speed up, takes practice. With that in mind, your first goal upon unlocking a new trial is to explore it without a care for time or performance. Upon completing it you’re then challenged to complete it in a given time limit or with less than a certain number of crashes.
Lonely Mountains Downhill has a deceptively simple look to it. The flat-shaded polygons, soothing environment and ambient environment noise belie the rage-inducing gameplay that is found within. For the majority of the time, this is of the one more go variety, but not always.
We start on the top of a mountain sitting on our pushbike, with the sole goal of getting to the bottom. Simple. Yet along the way, every single bump, rock and crevasse will thwart you should you so much as look at them hilarious. It wasn’t long before the past Trials rage was coming out. Each track bends and twists as you rough onward, often in surprisingly sharp ways. And seeing as we are relying on our pedal control here, our brakes are only so efficient too. Mastering both is vital to success, particularly later on.
Each of the four peaks on offer has several courses to ride. Starting, it’s simply a case of getting to your camp at the end of the run. You can fail as many times, or take as long as, you like. This allows you to traverse each area, finding shortcuts or hidden areas that will help later on. Keeping one eye on the track ahead while also looking out for shortcuts is quite the experience – especially at high speed. Often, these extra routes will demand some serious skill (and patience) to clear, with the payoff being a faster route down the mountain. You can put all that you learn into the succeeding challenges, with a 3-tier approach that will test even the calmest of players. While the challenge itself is fun, end also nets you rewards, such as bike parts or cosmetics for your rider. You’ll also need to clear certain challenges to open more trails or hills, though these tend to be on the easier side, thankfully.
Each of the trails typically crosses over at points with each other too, so using knowledge of other runs can come in handy here. It’s always clear where you are meant to go the criss-cross of steps could’ve been complicated, but as long as you’re going down you’re on the right track. Checkpoints along the way keep you on the road, each popping up with a timer as you pass to let you know how you’re doing.
Control of the bike feels great. There’s a real insight of grinding your tires through mud and grass, followed by a wonderfully earthy sound effect. Even at speed, it was easy to remain in control. Occasionally the physics would seemingly have a meltdown and fling my rider skyward for no reason, but for the most part, if I failed, it was because of my bravado.
Well, that and some iffy performance at times. Rather oddly, things ran smoothly as anything when playing the first mountain. The greens and greys of the background providing a nice setting for my cavalier riding. Moving on to the second mountain, however, I noticed things started to get choppy. A few seconds in and things were stuttering, almost as if every other frame was missing. But this only really occurred when there was a lot of red on the screen. Moving back to green pastures on the same track saw performance smooth out, only to dive again red was involved. It’s an odd situation and one that is compounded by the fact that both the second and third mountains are predominantly red…
The camera doesn’t help matters too. For the most part, the action is viewed from an isometric viewpoint. The thing is, a lot of the time we are riding into the screen, making future turns and barriers hard to react to in time. Lining up jumps can be exciting, as well as getting a good read of the land on trickier sections. Sometimes, background scenery straight up occludes your view, with your rider getting by on blind luck for a few seconds – or not. Megagon does at least allow a few control options to help you. I opted for the classic left and right controls, whereby you’re inputting are based in the rider’s direction regardless of the camera angle. My illustrious wife, however, got on better with 360-degree control, in which your analogue stick inputs are governed by camera angle,
I also found that some variable impact science at times botched my runs. Being on a mountain bike, it’s understandable that it’d be fairly easy to be knocked off. But while one instance ploughing headlong into a rock saw me bounce off harmlessly, another had me falling off for merely brushing a flower
