Snow Moto Racing 3D

Game Info

Snowmobile racing is a genre vastly under represented in gaming. With snowmobiling as popular as ever, the opportunity is there for a talented developer to really fill a niche, however small it may be. With this in mind, I was excited to try Snow Moto Racing 3D from Swedish indie developer Zordix. However, my expectations were buried under an avalanche of mediocrity.

If you played Zordix’s previous 3DS release, Aqua Moto Racing 3D, then this game will look very familiar to you. It appears most of the same assets and game play were reused, substituting the beach for the tundra. After you select your beginning rider’s name, country of origin, and uniform color, you start the first of two seasons of your career. Each season features six cups with three courses in each cup. For you math majors, that’s a total of 36 courses. Along with all these courses, there are 25 achievements and 12 different snowmobiles to unlock. That’s a decent amount of content for a downloadable title. As you progress through the various cups, you advance in rank, which allows you to buy the aforementioned snowmobiles from your garage with money you earn during races. I was expecting much more interactivity in the garage, with the ability to buy different parts or upgrades, but instead you just buy increasingly better sleds, each one a seemingly obvious upgrade from the last. This takes away some of the thrill of leveling up, but it is nice to have options on what you drive.

Once you’re out on the track, the game has some decent racing action. Some of the physics are a little questionable, as a nudge from an AI opponent to the back of you sled can immediately send you perpendicular to your intended path. Like instantaneously. Riders are packed together quite often, too, so this can become a point of frustration. While you’re racing there are various opportunities to perform stunts to earn extra cash and fill your turbo meter. You can also collect money and turbo tokens on the track. In short spurts the racing can be a good amount of fun, but it quickly grows stale. Track design is all over the place, from caves in the mountains to stadium racing arenas. Some of the open world tracks were fun to navigate, but it was hard to feel any momentum in the arena tracks with all the hills and AI in your face. The stunt system is interesting in that you can choose which stunt to perform based on the direction you push the circle pad while in the air. These are fun to watch the rare times you have enough air to actually pull one off. The animations take a while to get going, so the first few times I crashed pretty hard trying to land, but eventually I figured out the timing. It’s not as crisp as I would like, but it’s a pretty nice idea to incorporate. There is also a local multiplayer mode, but unfortunately I was unable to test this aspect of the game. I am told it features up to 6 players via download play, so if you like to get your couch racing on, you’re all set.

Snowscapes can make for some pretty awe-inspiring scenery, just not in this game. The graphics look like they would be right at home on the DS, which means they are quite disappointing as a 3DS title. Trees out on the course are just branchy Xs and lines pop-up in the courses all over the place. The 3D effect adds little, and I ended up turning it off after getting disoriented a couple times while bumping around with other racers. The soundtrack for the game is your generic extreme sports guitar riffs with weird synth melodies thrown in for good measure. It got repetitive even more than the gameplay and was quickly turned off. Another design decision that baffled me is the inability to use the control pad or buttons to navigate the menus on the touch-screen. The only way to select your race or do sled upgrades or do anything at all is via the touch-screen. I’d expect that you could at the very least use the A button to activate the “Continue” or “Next” commands, but nope. Toucha-toucha-toucha touch me is the motto here. Not a big deal, but it annoyed me when I would forget and still try the buttons.

THE RECOMMENDATION

All in all, Snow Moto Racing 3D is a decent time waster in a race setting you don’t see everyday. Things could have been a lot worse, but they could be better too. There’s a good amount of content to keep you busy, and you may return to it now and again when the winter mood strikes you, but for the most part it’s a pretty forgettable racer.