I got in! Starts tomorrow, but I work Fri-Sun unless the hurricane closes the store.
Got to try it out. Basic notes:
1) this is NOT a game for people looking for Skate: Snowboarding edition. The individual sports are pretty barebones and simple. Very few grabs (likely to change), but the biggest factor is the lack of control you have over spins. You can't even choose how much rotation you do, you just either flick the stick for "safe" rotation, as in the most you can do without having any question about landing it, or holding it for a "risky" rotation. You can't actually choose to do a huge 180, for example. Even worse, there's only 3 types of rotations you can do. Spins (both directions), rolls (both directions), and "off-axis" spins which are basically a hard diagonal rotation with no variations, hence me considering it one type despite having 4 directions. No word on grinds because I haven't seen them yet, if they're even in the alpha, or even in the game at all.
2) That being said, it has really good feel and flow for people that like mountain sports and just want to chill out.
3) Wingsuit is fun, paragliding isn't really my dig but whatever.
4) All comments about snowboarding applies to skiing, they're basically the exact same thing
5) the focus on "Sharing stunts" is definitely geared towards more of a "sharing a mission replay to show off how well you played the game" rather than actually filming tricks.
People looking for the next big snowboarding game? Pass, hard pass. But it's fun. It's a really chill game and the racing type stuff still feels pretty good, albeit rather forgiving and simple in the physics.
One thing it does that I like a lot, however, is a temporary health bar whenever you take a large drop or something. It regenerates fairly quickly but if you're landing hard cliff jumps repeatedly you'll start landing less clean and eventually you won't be landing huge drops unless you take a minute and ease up on it. In the same vein, massive, MASSIVE drops simply aren't landable and the game determines that through actually calculating G-Forces and horizontal momentum. If you're going faster you can lander bigger drops, if you're going too slow or the drop is simply too big, you're not making it.
TL;DR It's pretty fun, but nothing special and certainly not even close to the best snowboarding game out there, as is the curse of all attempts at a "Catch-all" game.
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