Game Reviews

Alto's Adventure

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iOS
| Alto's Adventure
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Alto's Adventure
|
iOS
| Alto's Adventure

Alto's Adventure is quite possibly the best-looking snowboarding game I've ever played. It's stunningly simple, and its mountain setting is at times utterly beautiful.

It's also bloody good fun. The easy-to-grasp one-touch gameplay and cleverly layered challenges make for a compulsive and engaging experience.

Mixed in with the wonderful graphics it makes for a dreamy mobile gaming experience that ranks among the best on the App Store.

Snow down

The actual core of the game isn't all that original. You're sliding down a randomly generated mountain-side, tapping the screen to jump and holding your finger down to flip in the air.

You can grind on strings of bunting and the tops of some buildings. Chaining together flips and grinds gets you plenty of points, and you need to bag coins and escaped llamas as well.

The day changes as you ride, with the sun setting and casting long shadows, before the world falls dark and little lamps start to light up around the villages you race through.

The challenges range from pulling off a set number of moves to making it a certain distance down the mountain, and once you've completed three you'll unlock three more.

There are huge gaps to leap through, elders to wake up with your snowboarding shenanigans, and a seemingly infinite number of llamas to round up.

Snow days

Alto's Adventure is a brilliant mobile game, small enough to fit into snatched seconds of play, but good enough to soak up hours of your time if you let it.

And you really should. There's something thrilling about sliding through a forest in the dark, then watching time slow as you flip over a chasm and snatch coins in the shape of a heart.

Alto's Adventure is pretty special, and while it might not be the most original game on the App Store, when it's this well put together it's pretty hard to fault.

Alto's Adventure

A beautiful, effortlessly playable endless snowboarder, Alto's Adventure is almost as much fun to play as it is to look at
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.