Every now and then, a game catches me totally off-guard and I find myself completely hooked in minutes. Usually it’s a game like Smite or Hearthstone that I find myself daydreaming about when I’m away from home, but every now and then I …
Every now and then, a game catches me totally off-guard and I find myself completely hooked in minutes. Usually it’s a game like Smite or Hearthstone that I find myself daydreaming about when I’m away from home, but every now and then I cross paths with a simple mobile experience that my mind keeps wandering back to.
I just didn’t want to stop playing Ski Safari 2. Ever.
Ski Safari 2 is a ridiculous mixture of extreme sports and the endless-running genres. In the game, players control a little customizable avatar as they attempt to speed away from a catastrophic avalanche that’s plummeting down the mountain behind them. Eventually you’ll wipe out enough times that the avalanche overtakes you and it’s game over. During your impossible escape you’ll collide with all sorts of wildlife and environmental objects that can both help and hinder your escape, and more importantly, your overall score.
One of the first things players will probably crash into are penguins. When you hit a penguin, you knock it on its belly and suddenly you’re using it as a snowboard, zooming down the mountain atop the fuzzy little critter. Then all of a sudden, boom, you crash through a cabin and bust out the other side in a bathtub! You then run into a Sasquatch who hops in the tub with you, just before you ramp off the edge of the mountain and soar through the air. A bald eagle swoops down and latches onto the shower head jutting up from the tub. You land pretty hard, and it shakes the eagle away. The tub is out of control, busting through rocks and into a cavern. You hit a big chunk of ice pretty hard and the tub shatters, the critters go flying. The big chunk of ice dislodges and it starts sliding away.
As you watch the giant chunk of ice start to slide you realize there is a frozen woolly mammoth inside. As you crash through the cave wall and back outside the ice shatters and suddenly you find yourself on the back of a rampaging woolly mammoth.
Ski Safari 2 is absolutely absurd in the best way possible.
To advance in the game, platers will level up by completing objectives during each run. The objectives range from riding atop power lines for a certain amount of time, breaking through X number of rocks, or ramping off of a roof while riding on top of a penguin. You are rewarded with gold coins which you can use to unlock different items for your avatar to wear, new snowboards/skis/vehicles, and two other entirely different landscapes to traverse through: prehistoric and Old Western.
As far as the gameplay goes, Ski Safari 2 controls well and plays incredibly smoothly. The game keeps up smooth framerates even as I plummeted super quickly down snowy mountain slopes. The responsiveness of your skier is excellent, and you benefit from making minor tweaks to your ski/snowboard angle as you touch down after being airborne. It’s a nice touch that really adds to the sense of momentum.
And while many mobile games have enabled a screenshot functionality that allows players to post images of their play sessions to social media, it hasn’t been until Ski Safari 2 that I’ve wanted to do so. Players can opt to pause the game at any moment to take a screenshot, and are given a handful of camera positioning options to tinker around with in order to obtain just the angle they want. The game saves all your snapshots to your profile, so you can keep them forever.
Ski Safari 2 is a great game to pick up for your mobile device. It’s fun, has lots to accomplish and unlock, it’s bright and silly — it’s basically everything you love about traditional mobile gaming distilled into a single title.
