5/5 ★ – QuickPlay's review of Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders.

Snow Riders is fluid and satisfying, and the first time I’ve truly enjoyed a difficult game that demands memorization and repetition. It’s seemingly more forgiving than its predecessor, with wider, sweeping turns, but with less snappy control. Trails are wide with a myriad of lines to take—designed with multiplayer in mind after all—but it allows for a feeling of “no wrong answers” when playing single player. This does make for a few confusing spots where the trail is unclear. Like Downhill, it is challenging but gratifying. Meeting and beating the goals for each trail net you experience points that opens up more of the shop, but the reward of beating a challenge is simply the feeling of a really good run. It’s challenge for the sake of challenge, going down a mountain just for the thrill. Even the new addition of flips and tricks are technically meaningless, but they’re just there to be sick as hell. Salvaging a slip up into a ridiculous jump you weren’t supposed to land is amazing. Crashes are of course frustrating, but inherently humorous. Again, like Downhill, Snow Riders is a great vibes game. For one, it’s beautiful with glittering snow and rushing snowflakes. It also solves an issue of potential wintery monotony by simply having snow in locales that wouldn’t normally get snow. For performance, there’s a Steam Deck preset, though it has some choppiness and clipping. What I’ve enjoyed best is going with the High preset, but bumping down the render scale to 60, and FPS at 50 in the Steam settings. It looks low poly, but smooth as butter. Environmental effects and the depth of field look great, with the end result of the most beautiful looking PS1 game you’ve ever seen. Online is in rough shape with a lot of jittery frames, but functions (and online has been the focus of most patches thus far). The only place Snow Riders has yet to improve on Downhill is the breadth of content: there’s not a lot to it currently with only three mountains to conquer (a grand total of 24 trails). But there’s a reasonable hope for post-release trails and mountains to be added in, as was the case with Downhill.