Review: Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands – Great Skiing Experience Among the Snow

Grand Mountain Adventure is an outstanding skiing game the world has never seen. This time, developers take a different approach, and make the most out of isometric style view combining it with the changing angle. There are not many sports games like that, since most of them use the third person perspective.

Grand Mountain Adventure charts a pathway in the genre of skiing simulators. However, it reminds me of the old school Ski or Die series, which, as far as I remember, came out it the late 80s or early 90s for Commodore Amiga computers, at least I used to play it on such machine. Back in those days, many games used the isometric view to stimulate us with some sort of  “3D” experience. Personally, I’m fond of such old school solutions, so when I took the first glance at Grand Mountain Adventure, my jaw just dropped ;-)

Well, generally speaking, it’s a skiing simulator combined with arcade elements, which takes place in an open world. Pack your back and get ready for the mountain trip of your life, with breathtaking winter landscapes. You can explore, take up challenges, and complete areas, which can grant access to other levels.

A mobile game with game console graphics

Apart from many other things, Grand Mountain Adventure needs to be praised for its beautiful graphics, which takes advantage of OLED mobile phone displays (I played it on my Samsung S20 Ultra). It’s hard to look away from those winter mountain landscapes, the snowy slopes and snow covered pines – everyone, who has been skiing in the mountains, knows what I’m saying. What’s interesting, Grand Mountain Adventure artwork reminds me a bit of Alto’s Odyssey.

The gameplay itself also counts as an advantage of Grand Mountain Adventure. Controls are very intuitive, you steer your character using two buttons, which makes the game playable on mobile screens of phones and tablets. I have to admit I was impressed with the gameplay. Usually, I play games on my console/laptop because it’s hard for me to find a mobile game, which would be both enjoyable and engaging – but this time I played on my phone for a week and didn’t touch my other gaming gear.

Grand Mountain Adventure gives you an open world

Thanks to the open world concept, Grand Mountain Adventure gives player far more options, and, far more things to take care of – e.g. sometimes you need to find a cableway to get to a certain point. If you miss a flag, don’t worry, you can always repeat the task, and take another attempt.

Grand Mountain Adventure also tries to simulate the physics of the real-life skiing experience. You need know how fast can you go not to miss your checkpoint. You have to act smoothly and quickly. Wonderful and realistic visual effects accompany every move. Snow sprinkles from underneath the skis every time you take a sharp turn.

It takes time to master all the snow tracks of Grand Mountain Adventure. The controls of this sports game is a bit different, as it makes you develop a certain strategy, minding the physics and many other skiing parameters such as angle and speed. With all that in the back of your head, you dive into the smooth and satisfying gameplay of Grand Mountain Adventure.

Breathtaking landscapes

Grand Mountain Adventure takes you to wonderful places. The game offers you a map, which I found very helpful during mountain exploration. That’s right, you can take a peek into the map anytime, and check everything you want to know. It’s one of the most useful things in the whole game.

The mountains are full of secrets, items to be collected, and various challenges to take up. You will need to discover the right paths, which would allow you to take appropriate jumps –it’s extremely important especially when you unlock the harder challenges, which require using advanced skills such as balancing with the ski poles.

Technically, Grand Mountain Adventure is a well-designed game. The artists did a decent job drawing us this skiing simulator, which stands out from the crowd in many aspects. It’s hard to think of any other game that would display such great mountain landscapes on a mobile phone screen. Everyone should try it, even gamers, who are not fond of sports game on a regular basis. Personally, I’m more into RPGs/Arcade games, but Grand Mountain Adventure is one of my favorite exceptions to the principle.

In conclusion, Grand Mountain Adventure ends up on my favorite Android games list – it would literally bowl you over with its quality.

Pros:

• Open World
• Beautiful graphics with breathtaking winter landscapes
• Well-balanced difficulty level
• Well designed to fit mobile screens

The game is available for: PlayStation 5, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Series X and Series S and Microsoft Windows.