Infinite Air with Mark McMorris

My first hour with Infinite Air was genuinely humbling, and not in a good way. The game pitches itself as the Skate of snowboarding, pulling tricks with analog sticks and triggers rather than memorised button combos, and that comparison is fair enough on paper. The left stick handles carving and braking; the right stick drives nollies, ollies, and trick direction; the triggers preload jumps and modify grabs. In practice, the sensitivity is so tight that casual carving turns into accidental spins, and once you launch into a flip or roll, there is essentially no way to correct mid-air. Landing windows are narrow, the progress system gates content behind skill checks, and the tutorial does a poor job of explaining any of it. Expect a few hours of frustrated face-plants before the controls start to click, if they ever do. When things do click, the sandbox underneath is genuinely interesting. The game sits on over 100 square miles of procedurally generated backcountry, and a helicopter lets you drop in anywhere on the mountain at any time, which is a clean, friction-free feature that makes the scale feel usable rather than just decorative. The world editor is the real hook: it is mostly drag-and-drop, lets you terraform slopes, place rails, pipes, ramps, and props, and then upload runs for other players to ride. Circuit mode adds structure with six tiers of developer-built challenges across disciplines including slopestyle, halfpipe, and big air, each tier capped by a boss race against one of the six playable pros: Mark McMorris, Craig McMorris, Silje Norendal, Torstein Horgmo, Danny Davis, and Ulrik Badertscher. That roster reads well for snowboarding fans. The character and board customisation is deeper than it looks at first glance too. The problem is everything surrounding those highlights. The community that would give the editor and user-shared runs their long-term value never really materialised. The player base is small, some multiplayer achievements are now effectively locked, and post-launch updates dried up early. On PC specifically, the game requires a controller, full stop; keyboard and mouse are not supported for actual play, and the mouse cursor has a habit of staying on screen during gameplay anyway. These are the kinds of rough edges that a healthy live game patches out. This one did not get that treatment. The OpenCritic aggregate puts the critic consensus at a 48, landing it near the bottom of the pile for the year. There is a version of this game that real snowboarders who have also put hundreds of hours into the Skate series will genuinely love. If that is you, the physics feel of nailing a triple cork in slopestyle or locking into a rail correctly apparently lands close enough to the real thing that a small dedicated group still defends it strongly. For everyone else, the steep learning curve, thin structured content, quiet servers, and clunky PC implementation make this a hard sell at any price above a deep discount.

Alex · Scout Team

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