Grand Mountain Adventure drops you onto one of two massive mountain resorts with not much besides a pair of skis and total freedom. The Android game, currently in beta, gives you total freedom to explore on your own, using a fairly realistically-behaving pair of skis. You’ll work the controls by touching and dragging two ski icons on either side of the screen, and that’s about it. There’s no dedicated button for more advanced stuff like jumping, drifting or sliding; if you want to accomplish any of that, you’ll have to use the main controls accordingly, much like you would on a real pair of skis.
Exploring two big mountains on a pair of skis with realistic physics is a tranquil experience indeed. Still, it could get boring after a while, so the game offers two things to spice things up and make exploration a bit more involved; challenges and unlockable lifts. You can use the lifts to get to places you normally would have a very hard time reaching, and you unlock those lifts with Ski Tokens earned from doing challenges. You can score bronze, silver or gold on a given challenge, and each score gives you a different number of ski tokens. You can unlock more lifts, more areas, and more challenges by earning extra ski tokens, so if you seem stuck and you happen to have not gotten the best score on some prior challenges, you can always try those again and see if more tokens will open up more for you to explore.
The Android game was made over the course of six years by a pair of brothers, and the full release is planned for this winter. For now, this public beta preview only has two mountains to ski on, large in scale as they may be. The game is completely free and devoid of ads as of this writing, and the makers are looking for any sort of feedback that can help improve the game in the final months leading up to the release. Bug reports, ideas, and even compliments on what parts of the game were done exceptionally well are all welcome. If you’d like to try the game out, follow the Google Play Store link below.
