System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: £3.99
Comfort Rating: Red (Extreme Movement)
Genre: Sports
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers, Gamepad, Keyboard & Mouse
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
Description: Alpine Ski VR brings the thrill of skiing to your desktop! Alpine SKI VR utilises all the headset’s sensors to recreate an authentic skiing feel. Carefully designed to minimise motion sickness it is guaranteed to bring to you the thrill and excitement of skiing in the comfort of your own home. Compatible with Oculus and Vive! Use either a headtilt or your Vive controllers as ski poles to help you on those tricky slopes!
Review: Are you someone who likes to tear up fresh power and race downhill on two hockey sticks? If you are, maybe Alpine Ski VR is the game for you. This is a ski game all about you and your faithful friend gravity. There are 3 game modes to choose from: Freestyle, Slalom and Heliski. Freestyle sees you performing all sorts of sick stunts from ramps and snow mounds, you tilt your head and perform spins and twists, then must land with the line in the green. Slalom is pretty obvious and sees you racing downhill over a number of courses in a slalom (between the flags) style.
And finally, Heliski is where you are given a helicopter and you get to tell them where to drop you off. Set over a larger terrain this is skiing in it’s most natural form. Freestyle and Slalom feature six levels each and the Heliski gives you 100km2 to ski in, so plenty to see and do here. Then there is the leaderboard that you can do score challenges with, so while there is no multiplayer options, you can still make it a multiplayer game.
The simple tilt controls remind me of a basic Google Cardboard VR game, but this is so much more than that. With a good range of game modes, levels and settings, there is more than enough here to get value for money and to be fair it is not a bad looking game at all. While the lack of better controls is annoying I soon found myself getting used to the head tilting motion. Alpine Ski VR puts the fun back into skiing and turns out to be more fun than you might think. If you love your snow, this could be the way to go.
