Horatio Goes Snowboarding [Xbox]
Developed by Infinite State Games and EastAsiaSoft, Horatio Goes Snowboarding is a very fun arcade-snowboarding game in which you’ll take control of Horatio, a little, round, moustachioed dude who loves to hit the slopes.
You start out with £300, with a board hire costing you £20, and any medical emergencies (eg: getting hit by a car or crashing on the slopes) will set you back £100 per visit. Each day, the prize for reaching the bottom of the slopes increases by £10 (with an extra fiver added for a perfect run where you make it through all of the flag markers), so you’ll need to carefully make it to the end each day without too many scrapes - as once you run out of money, it’s game over. For each day that you succeed, your Board Hire will carry over, saving you that £20 expense - but if you end up at the hospital, not only will you cost yourself the £100 emergency fee, you’ll need to shell out another £20 for a board.
As well as the Snowboarding aspect, each day you’ll have to make it to the helicopter that takes you to the slopes by crossing a few roads, dodging out of the way of vehicles in the process. The more days pass, the busier these roads get, making it all the more likely that you’re gonna get hit. There’s also a Yeti that will sometimes appear on the mountain, hunting you down the tracks. If you avoid him enough, he’ll eventually run off, destroying trees in the process, but if he gets you, then it’s off to the hospital you go. It really reminds me of a game I played as a kid on my Uncle’s PC called SkiFree, due to its own Abominable Snowman that absolutely terrified me when it came chasing after me as I tried my hardest to concentrate on the flag markers.
Done in a very cutesy style, Horatio Goes Snowboarding looks great - with almost cartoony graphics and a simple look that works well. The music is very bass-y, and at times there’s a slight voiceover, such as when you start a new run on the slopes, although the altered voice can sometimes be a little hard to decipher. The only real purpose of the game is to get a high score, by lasting as long as possible, and increasing your score via Grandstanding (swerving close to trees and other hazards) as well as knocking skiers out of the way, so adding some other stuff could have made it a little more fleshed out and exciting, such as customising your character with alternate clothing; maybe another colour of snowboard, instead of just the boring yellow one you’ll get each time; or maybe even something like allowing you to get additional health pickups on the slope to allow you to continue after a single mistake, providing you’ve got the pickup - there’s loads of things that could be tweaked or added just to add a little more variety to the game.
There’s an Endless mode available too, but you’ve got to hit 1,000,000 combined points in order to unlock it, which can take a while if you’re not too great at surviving each day - but with enough repeated attempts, you’ll eventually get there! It’s a game with a simple, yet addictive premise. Controlling Horatio feels decent, and can be done either with the analog stick or with the left and right triggers, although it does take a run or two to get the hang of just how much pull you have when swerving from side to side. I never felt like I’d been robbed of a successful run any time I messed up - aside from once where the Yeti bashed down a tree that then smashed into me - the controls feel tight, and any over-adjusting to reach a flag and causing myself to crash straight into a pile of rocks felt very much deserved.
Horatio Goes Snowboarding is a lot of fun to play, and we’ve really enjoyed our time playing it. It’s really easy to just pick up and play when you’ve not got a lot of time, as loading into a run is fast (and you can even speed up the intro of the level and landing the helicopter by holding in A), but I must admit this sometimes led me to get quite impatient afterwards, as I’d run straight into passing cars after not giving them enough time to get out of my way! If you like the sound of this, you can pick it up for £5.79 on the Xbox Store, which we found to be a great price for a fab wee arcade game that we’ll come back to time and time again.
In the end, we decided to give Horatio Goes Snowboarding the Collecting Asylum rating of 7.5/10.
Are you interested in Horatio Goes Snowboarding? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to EastAsiaSoft for the Horatio Goes Snowboarding Xbox review code!
