A labour of love by snowmobile enthusiasts looking to scratch the off-season itch, Sledders seeks to provide a realistic snowmobile experience where you zoom across the snowy tundras and ride powdery slopes so deep you could drown in them.
Realism is the theme here. Steering isn’t controlled so much by the skis, but by the tilt and lean of the rider, and even then this felt very inconsistent. I spent more time beneath the snow than riding atop it. Throttling is also difficult to get right – gas too hard too soon and you’ll find yourself facing the sky while digging a big hole in the snow you can only reset out of. Resetting the position also turns you around 180 degrees, so you’re no longer heading in the original direction, a questionable decision for a game where you’ll probably be racing against others and end up riding back towards them.
My time with Sledders was relatively frustrating as I inexorably slammed into any and every tree in my path as though drawn to it by a magnet, dug myself deeper into the snow by inadvertently doing donuts, and generally found the snowmobile too difficult to control.
There are many snowmobile options to choose from, ranging in horsepower. The faster they go, the quicker they chew through the snow creating channels that impede your ability to traverse it. The slower the snowmobile, you’ll gain some mobility but don’t have the horsepower to get you up the slopes.
Dipping into the multiplayer I picked a game that had a few players currently on the map. I was somewhat relieved to see that everyone else seemed to be experiencing the same issues as me. I opened the map to watch them as they too spun in circles and made very little forward progression. If there was currently a race to a non-existent meeting point in progress, nobody would have won it.
While the graphics are very clean, and particularly pretty riding through the woods as the evening sun dapples through the trees, there is little to keep someone like me engaged. At this stage of early access, there isn’t any background music, and the only sound effect is the snowmobile engine – singular, for all the options available. There are currently three maps – Woodland, Mountains, and Hills – and all heavily feature lots of snow and trees, with some variation to altitude, but in reality there is little to differentiate between them.
Sledders feels very niche. Developers Hanki Games are all serious snowmobilers and have shunned the “arcade-y race with a snowmobile skin” for a more challenging and realistic snowmobiling game experience. You could ask, well what is so niche about that? And I would answer that only hardcore snowmobile enthusiasts will likely stick Sledders out. The controls take time to master, and even then are still very twitchy, and inconsistent. This isn’t a pickup and play title for casual gamers.
With tweaks to the control scheme (or perhaps with more control options) and the ability to move the camera positioning, Sledders could be entertaining. But this current iteration is more immobile than snowmobile, and not much fun to play with a control scheme this demanding.
Sledders hits early access on Steam this December. Published by Bonus Stage.