Snowtopia (PC) - Early Access Review

Skiing, it is an act of suicide that’s encouraged. Outside of extreme sports games like SSX, I’ve never understood the mentality of strapping a dodd of wood to your feet and flinging yourself off the side of a mountain towards some trees. However, the idea of selling that to some suckers as I build my ski resort empire off the now broken necks and backs of families that have already paid me? Wonderful!

Snowtopia: Ski Resort Tycoon is exactly that, a tycoon game about taking money from young families that are about to lose daddy as he smacks a tree at 50 mph and snaps several vertebrae. Ok, being serious for a minute, Snowtopia is a new early access tycoon game about running a ski resort, and it was released on Tuesday. As typical for tycoon games, you are tasked with completing incremental challenges to improve the business while also keeping customers happy. Though unlike Mars Horizon, which focused on budgets, resources, and education, Snowtopia does something more like Cities: Skylines. Your focus is to maneuver and balance the traffic jams, or in this case, blocks of humanity cueing for their daily dose of hari-kari.

The obvious caveat being that the game is in Early Access, so further developments such as resources and currencies to purchase buildings may yet come. Without those guiding decisions, there is an emptiness to the decisions you make other than designing your perfect mountain of murder. Or for legal reasons, your assisted suicide resort and hotels. This isn’t to say there are zero difficulties, I just happen to fall backwards up a mountain with unbelievable luck. The biggest resource to manage happens to be the volunteers to your resort, and they come at a dime a dozen.

They aren’t the only thing I realized I had an abundance of, as I’d built a majority of my resort from one Chalet. Once I’d realized I’d never get punished for having 30-40 staff doing either everything or nothing, I started throwing them at every building possible. I started building everything and staffing it to capacity because I’d keep getting more and more staff every few minutes. After some time, I had only half my staff working with the rest probably licking trees to keep the snow off of them, or something like that.

It was only about halfway through the tutorial that I realized the mountains have more than one little chalet and accompanying cabins surrounding the main building. I am stupid. So while I was trying to throw everything at one single side of a mountain, only in a desperate attempt to increase the number of skiers (all of whom were queuing for lifts) that were peaking at a 290 total, I found two other starting points. The second I opened up a second chalet, it was like Operation Overlord on anti-depressants. Within a minute, I’d ballooned from nearly 300 skiers to almost 900. It turns out, a lot of people want to throw themselves off of a cliff face towards some trees.

Once the map opened up, through my incompetence, I got into that Cities: Skylines lull, in a good way. The comparison wasn’t a mistake, Snowtopia in this early stage is one of those relaxing tycoon games that will gently yell when you are culling the population a bit too much; very much like Cities: Skylines. It is the type of game where you can put on a podcast, or something Doctor Who related, and comfortably doddle away at whatever it is you are doing. I quite like that, as I can sit atop a mountain I’ve not sullied with my snowy tourism yet and simply watch the machine turn.

That said, I am not an unforgiving man; I do have grievances. Little things like a lack of sound effect to say “I am paused now,” are strange, along with the lack of something subtle telling you that research on upgrades and new parts for your resort are complete. That criticism is paired with the desire for notifications of issues being a little larger/clearer to read, especially on smaller resolutions. An ability to cap the number of people could also be useful, if not for lower-end systems dealing with performance issues. All of these are minor things I would suspect would/could be implemented later on.

Of course, more pressing issues would be stabling the building of mountain top structures. Half the time you’ll spend swearing that you saw one tiny pixel where you can build that ski lift, but now you can’t find it behind “slope too steep,” “connection too short,” and other error messages telling you that it might be dangerous to build there. It is the side of a snowcapped mountain that people fly down on a bit of wood. The phrase “dangerous” would be the last word I’d use, right behind several swear words and “some poo has just come out!”

I would also like to see the ability to carve non-skiing paths out of the snow. There were occasions where my placement of hilltop lifts would only fit in specific sections high above, and even more precise locations near the hotel. Some placements only allowed for placement a few feet away from the predesignated semi-circle surrounding the chalet, which is one of only a few areas the blob people will walk in.

Out of the gate, Snowtopia isn’t blowing off socks and revolutionizing the genre. However, it is neither as dry and dull as the aforementioned Mars Horizon could be at times. It is an enjoyable blend of characterized blobs of humanity and gentle business management, only let down by minor issues for which the genre of early access is made to remedy. Personally, I’m excited to see what comes next and how the game will improve over time.

A PC copy of Snowtopia: Ski Resort Tycoon was provided by Goblinz Studio for this review.