Game Reviews

Ski Champion

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| Ski Champion
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Ski Champion
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| Ski Champion

With spring springing, the sun high in the sky, and drunks stumbling about half-naked screaming curses at imagined foes, what better time to strap planks to your feet and head off to the slopes for some icy escapism?

Ski Champion offers up freemium-shaped chunks of on-piste action, and while it singularly fails to capture the glide and carve of the sport, it still manages to hold the attention with its mix of device tilting and second shaving gameplay.

Skiing while piste

It's your job to guide your Lycra-clad snow junkie from the top of a hill to the bottom, tilting your phone to slide him between gates. Sticking tight to the gates earns you a star, which knocks a fraction of a second from your overall time, but if you miss one you're chucked back out to the start.

There are bronze, silver, and gold times to beat, and you'll need to win at least the cheapest of the metallic medals to move onto the next stage. Alternatively, you could just buy all of the stages by flashing some real-life cash.

You start the game with 100 ski passes, and these are used up every time you start a run. Once they're all gone, you won't be able to play again until you purchase some more from the in-game shop. Sometimes it's worth wasting one just to experience the incredibly over the top crash animations.

Luke-warm runnings

Ski Champion could replace its central tenet with snowboarding, downhill skateboarding, or cheese-rolling, and it wouldn't really make much difference. At no point do you feel like you're engaging in a graceful battle between friction and snow.

Still, the push to better your times quickly becomes a mild addiction. Twisting and turning through the red and blue flags isn't the most natural of endeavours, but you'll soon be hugging the poles, maintaining your speed, and generally having a rather pleasant time.

The collision detection is a little iffy, and the track design is far from perfect, but there's a chilly kick to the gameplay that turns Ski Champion from a wonky oddity into an entertaining imitation of something that looks a bit like skiing.

Ski Champion

It may not bear the closest resemblance to the sport it claims to simulate, but Ski Champion is a perfectly adequate way of wasting a few minutes
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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.