A lama drama

Alto’s Adventure is an endless-runner that is stuffed with style. Gather the young Alto’s lamas in a mad-cap chase down a mountain that has you grinding along prayer flags, leaping chasms, and out racing your elders.

Hit the slopes

Your first moments with Alto’s Adventure are lightly to be quite conflicted. You can’t ignore how beautiful it looks, with the almost silhouetted look of the character and other sprites perfectly setting off the bold colors of the snow colored mountain and gorgeous changing sky.

But, as you set off after the escaped lamas on Alto’s snowboard through the tutorial, it’s hard to escape the feeling that its stunning visuals are just a new coat of paint on a game you have played 100 times before.

It is only once you are out of the tutorial that things start to feel different. While the basic gameplay of tapping the screen to hop over rocks and chasms falls squarely into the tried and tested endless-runner formula, there is something undefinable refreshing to Alto’s Adventure.

Procedural challenge

Each procedurally generated course feels like it could have been hand crafted through the well-judged difficulty curve. This creates a fantastic flow to the action that means levels are constantly challenging, without being overly difficult. That said, I have been known to swear when the day-night cycle punishes me with a rock hidden in the darkness.

And, when the base gameplay does begin to feel repetitive, you can start to pay attention to the various challenges. From catching ten lama’s in a single run to performing 30 back-flips, these ensure you constantly vary up your play style.

Many of this challenges utilize the game’s subtleties of gameplay: hold the screen while in the air to perform a slow arcing back-flip, bounce off rocks to build up speed, collect items and power-ups, outrun elders, and grind the various prayer flags along the path to cruise over dangerous areas. It’s a constant build, that ensures Alto is constantly mixing up its formula.

Out running the competition

It is this combination of the constant ramp in difficult, variety of challenge, and beautiful, smooth visuals that make Alto’s Adventure rapidly out distance its competition. Finally, an endless-runner I could play endlessly.