over the hill

Heartbreaking thumbs down, wish there was more gameplay tldr - certainly gorgeous, but very lacking in gameplay. game boils down to holding forward and taking in the view. great if you need it to be the one thing that wont ask much from your brain at the end of a work day, but a letdown if you expected engagement from it. Let me preface this by saying i played a lot of the developers previous game, Art of Rally. I really, really enjoyed it, and it is one of my all time favorite games. Art of Rally is a time attack racing game where you master driving a variety of cars and utility vehicles in different track and weather conditions. When I first saw the trailer for Over the Hill, I thought to myself that the game would follow similar roots but in a different context - a lot of personality, style and great music that enhances a solid and fun gameplay loop. In art of rally, the gameplay loop was time attack, and in this game (or so i thought), it would be exploring and getting through difficult terrain with your friends, something like snowrunner or other off road simulator games. Upon first playing Over the Hill, I found out that the team really knocked it out of the park with the style and sound with this one - certainly one of the prettiest games ive ever seen, full stop. The game is structured like your usual ubisoft game - there is an open world map, and you have to find collectibles and do missions inside it. Doing those things gives you money (called pebbles) with which you can upgrade your vehicle. There are 5 zones and a serviceable amount of content in each one of them. This, however, is where one of my major gripes with the game appears: why, in an exploration game, would the world already be explored? In each zone, opening the map tells you where the outposts (respawn points) are. This is a weird choice, but it would be fine on its own, as the map is initially covered in a fog of war that gets cleared as you move. The issue escalates when clearing said fog of war marks all pathways and reveals the exact location of most of what there is to do inside the zone, excluding wild animals and meteorites (two types of collectibles). And that would be fine too, it would save completionists precious time of their lives, but.... It becomes a real problem when every zone in the game is trivial to navigate. There, I said it. This is the major issue with this game. There is rarely a point at which you will make interesting gameplay decisions to go from point A to point B. Suppose you looked at the map and saw an outpost far into the wilderness. You'd think that you and your buddies would have to go through an actual adventure to get there - start with a road and follow it until you have to ditch it and go through the uncharted terrain to get to your destination. You'd think you would have to lay down planks to get better traction, carefully balance your throttle to avoid losing grip, withstand unrelenting weather, thunderstorms, snow, the raw force of nature, and when you're through it, you'd have a great story to tell. That assumption is wrong: in over the hill, you follow the trail on the map until you get to the destination, and that involves holding throttle for a few minutes while occasionally changing gears and steering. In over the hill, almost every journey you would think to make already has a set route, baked into the map by the developers for you to go through. The route is extremely clear - it is marked with dirt, pebbles and smooth stones for you, with a high prop count and organized to look like a path, as opposed to the rest of the map, which is mostly decorative, low density props without a very clear purpose to them. Whenever you need to go somewhere the developers have made sure to make it so the way there is as smooth sailing and obvious as possible (think yellow paint from triple A games). This path, or rather THE path, is what is shown to you on the map as well, be it one of the main roads put there to get you to adventure faster, or the "adventure" itself. I honestly can't quite put into words how mind boggling this is! How in the world can you have an adventure into uncharted territory to discover something if you are driving through an obvious trail following an annotated map to find something the game already told you about!!! This wouldn't be as terrible if it wasn't for the fact that the game is completely stripped of challenge - most of my playtime was literally full sending the car through these trails, bottoming out the accelerator, because i almost never felt the need to stop and plot my next steps (there was only one path forward), the path forward was easy to navigate, and worst of all, i was never punished for just bottoming out all the time, essentially turning the game into a car version of a walking simulator. If you try this in Art of Rally, in the very first corner you will spin out and crash your rally car. In this game, it is difficult to have anything happen to you: your car's center of mass is almost under the ground, I threw it off a mountain (not a cliff, a mountain) and it didn't break down, and even the game itself tells you that when you're facing tough weather like a snowstorm, you're meant to camp and wait it out so that your adventures are always easy. This is very contradicting, because if the terrain was more difficult or unclear to go through, you would spend more time on it and then have more time to take in the view and absorb the game's art. The game gives you a number of extra tools (planks for traction, extra winches, a "get out of jail free" respawn nearby) to aid you to go through the terrain, and in all my playtime so far i never needed them once. The whole time i was playing I was thinking "okay, surely that was the introduction and now things are gonna get hard", "okay, that was the early game, now comes the challenge", but things never changed, it just kept being this boring chore simulator where you hold forward and steer from point A to point B. This review is already too long and i couldn't touch on many points that i feel are also important to bring up, like how i felt like nothing i did or achieved meant anything because i felt the game was designed in such a way that the starter car with no upgrades could beat it no trouble, or how i dont feel like cosmetics are a good reward for holding throttle for minutes straight, or how the upgrades are tied to chassis even though all of the ones i got felt the exact same in handling and power, but alas. I may sound harsh, but i really loved many things about this game, and i only beared the mind numbing walk foward simulator gameplay because of the incredible art and character this game has. I really love the work and passion funselektor puts into their games, and all I've said above is in hopes for the game to improve on these pain points. As my final thoughts, I cannot recommend this game because to me the gameplay formula is the fundamentally broken. In this game, cosmetics, adventure and the views are the point, except that you cannot pick which cosmetic you want to unlock when you find a generic cosmetic crate, the world has already been "pre-adventured" for you (lest you have to find your way somewhere), and the game actively tells you not to experience it in its prettiest moments - during gameplay you're meant to wait out the game's prettiest storms through camping, but in photo mode you can force any weather you want. To me, this feels extremely counter intuitive and made Over the Hill earn a heartbreaking thumbs down from me.