Ski Jumping Pro (iOS)

NOTE: As is the nature of mobile games, it is possible this game may undergo changes to its gameplay design, monetization model, or it may include limited time events. This is a review of the game’s state as of February 21st, 2018.

Ski jumping isn’t really a sport that draws in the crowds, so it’s no surprise very few video games put their eggs in that particular basket, instead often shunting the sport into Winter Olympic collections where it usually settles in as something simple yet unremarkable. However, the mobile market is the perfect platform for taking a rather small game concept and fleshing it out without the need to worry too much about the profitability of the final product. Ski Jumping Pro decided to take this simple winter sport and run with it, but while the mobile platform allowed it to explore the sport more than many other games would ever care to do, it also lead to a few of the traits that held it back from being a bit more.

Ski Jumping Pro offers a large variety of different ski jumps across the globe, many with specific ties to famous events like the Olympics or the Ski Jumping World Cup. Even though the ramp you actually jump from only has small deviations that don’t often effect the jump greatly, the different venues have unique visuals that make the jumping experience more interesting, and the varying steepness of the inclines means you’ll be flying different distances depending on your choice of slope. Each ski jumping location keeps track of your personal best as well as a top score for that location that you can gradually work towards beating. The locations also look pretty marvelous, with some beautiful shots of the surrounding area that work wonderfully as long as you don’t look too closely at anything. If you’re focused on the task at hand instead of the environment, the flat audience textures and visual compromises aren’t so easily spotted, but the game seems to invite you to marvel at these locations and thus notice the seams.

As for the actual ski jumping, the design is a bit wanting, but it works well enough without being too easy. When it’s time to jump, you need to tap at the right time to take off, the right time to jump, and the right time to land, a ring on screen growing and shrinking to indicate when the perfect time to tap the screen is. There is a Focus power-up that you can press to get a free perfect take off, but in my experience, Focus always made my runs worse somehow so it felt more like a feature for people who can’t get the timing right rather than one needed to succeed. If you are set to Casual controls, these features are the only ones you’ll face, but if you turn on Pro, the ski jumping gets a bit more interesting as balance gets involved. Either by tipping your device or dragging your finger across the screen, you must now keep your jumper on a steady course to better your flight distance and to earn style points with the judges. Every ski jump’s score is a combination of your distance and the judge’s rankings on your performance, with you getting two jumps that total up for the final verdict.  Casual mode, you end up having very little interaction with your eventual score since it is all down to the taps, but Pro gives you the ability to rise above the game’s prescribed results, although the dragging control method feels a lot more finicky than the tilt controls. The fact that you must tap the screen to jump and drag a finger across the screen for balance can lead to many accidental taps, and while the ski jumper usually will only wipe out during the most egregiously incorrect taps, the tilt controls are both immersive and functional so there’s no need to hinge your performance on the other control method.

There are two main modes to Ski Jumping Pro, the Quick Jump and Career. Quick Jump is where you go if you want to just do some low pressure jumps on the various slopes, competing against your own personal best and the slope record with no penalty for failure. At first, you might balk at seeing you only have a single slope unlocked, but you unlock them pretty easily by just playing the slopes in sequential order. Do a single run on the first slope, and the second is now available, making the game’s attempts to get you to buy them a bit unusual. Unless you really want to skip ahead to a certain slope, there’s no reason to ever waste your precious in-game cash on it. Career is the meat of the experience though, as there are multiple cups where your combined performance will lead to you getting better rewards and potentially earning trophies for your performance. These cups do use the same slopes as Quick Jump, so its mostly just about having goals assigned to them since these jumps can’t be repeated until after you’ve finished the entire tournament… although you can restart in the middle of a jump if you aren’t happy with your performance. However, because of the incredibly simple controls, your performance at these events won’t really be up to your skill at the helm so much as it will be a test of your skier’s stats.

Ski Jumping Pro has a pretty strong focus on the creation of your athlete, with 28 countries of origin for your skier, including the expected countries as well as the likes of Kazakhstan, Estonia, the country that is often mysteriously ignored in winter sports games: China. The more important customization options come through the game’s upgrade system, and while you may think this was a game about getting good at the ski jump, it’s really about getting better equipment for your athlete and buying training to up their skills. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though, the implementation is where this game idea falters. As you do jumps, you’ll earn two different types of currencies: cash and stars. Cash is more abundant, provided even during Quick Jumps, but Stars are distributed in very small amounts, never appearing as rewards during Quick Jump and usually just being handed out one at a time during competitions until you’ve reached the end and receive the larger purse. Thankfully, the in-game store requires less stars for upgrades and training, but they will still be the major roadblock to making your athlete as good as they could be. For the cash though, I actually found it quite thrilling to try and bolster my reserves through what basically amounted to practice. As a training regime I’d take my ski jumper to the slopes and earn cash to buy the stat and gear upgrades, but as you start nearing the better equipment and higher level upgrades, the stars become a necessity that can’t be acquired through something akin to practice.

Here’s where the game’s monetization model enters the picture. If you pay real world money, you can buy stars so it’s far easier to buy the upgrades, although you can just watch a bunch of ads to earn stars at a rate of 5 per video. The game is not impossible to play if you just want to earn the stars through watching ads, although you will need quite a bit of time set aside if you choose that route as it feels like the total star amount you need to max out your stats (ignoring the optional purchases like the Sponsorship that gives you a brief boost to your cash earnings) is around 2500. Unsurprisingly, the largest package in the in-game store is 2500 stars, but I can’t assure you of the price. While it normally seems like 15 dollars, turning my device to airplane mode changed the prices in the in-game store, which is usually a sign of the manipulative practice of adjusting game prices to be higher or lower based on how much the game thinks you’ll be willing to spend. It is understandable that the game wants to make money since it is available for free, and this system could almost be tolerable if it was scraped free of the potential manipulation, but the game dips in too hard to try and force your hand and still peppers the game with constant advertisements. During the course of the game, you can expect 30 second ads to crop up after nearly every ski jump or if you idle on a menu too long, so this game feels like it must be played in airplane mode to avoid the constant annoying interruptions.  The game does offer an ad-free version if you pay of course, but the most sinful thing it does involves the way competitions can unfold. If you aren’t willing to pay to get a bunch of stars to start and won’t grind out the cash, competitions are going to be heavily skewed against you.

During the course of the competitions,  you won’t be the only one leveling up. Computer controlled opponents will gradually get their own upgrades, getting better and better based on their performance compared to you. Since these competitions hinge more on how upgraded you are than your skill at jumping, if you aren’t the right level to place first early on, expect the computer players to slowly grow out of control. One by the name of Michael H. became my own personal bugbear, his early first place wins as I tried to upgrade naturally giving him the growth he needed to consistently place first no matter what I did to try and overcome him. Even when I trained up as much as I could and watched tons of ads to get the stars needed for better upgrades, Michael H. still placed higher than me even as I approached the threshold for how high I could upgrade. My gear was the best it could be and my stats near the limit, and Michael, despite being lower-leveled, was guaranteed the top spot in single jumps, and the combined totals for the events meant he snowballed out of range even on the rare slope he didn’t have a guaranteed victory. I had thought this was just a quirk of how I let him grow out of control, a unique experience… but then something strange happened. A new rival entered the fray, bumping me out of my second place slot on many jumps… despite being up to 30 levels lower than me. Levels are meant to represent the combined bonuses of your stats and gear, and this new computer player was somehow able to become just as untouchable without even being close to my level. Even with perfect points from the judges and getting the Excellent rating on every tap, I would still get third place for no explainable reason. Wrapping up the tournaments, I restarted but had huge reserves of cash and stars to upgrade with before I entered the tournaments this time, and… suddenly it was first place every time. If you don’t want to settle for second or third place in tournaments, it might all come down to tipping the scales through real money purchases or absurd grinding before you even start doing the serious slopes, but doing so would destroy any real chance of the game challenging you in any meaningful way, unless you count time and money sinks as a thrilling challenge.

THE VERDICT: While I wouldn’t call Ski Jumping Pro a ski jumping simulator due to how simplified the process is, it at least had the promise of being a game that could capture the sport well enough. It would’ve been accessible to a fault, but it would have been a fine time waster, a slice of the ski jumping experience but with very little depth. Unfortunately, as mobile games often do, the need to make money meant Ski Jumping Pro held back its experience, skewing computer players and its upgrade system to try and draw out cash from players who won’t settle for second place.

And so, I give Ski Jumping Pro for iOS…

A BAD rating. The simplistic ski jumping would have been enough to earn it an Okay ranking, reproducing the sport but not really making it a compelling challenge due to your limited control over the events, but the way monetization wormed itself into the design of the game wears it down to something that loses what charm it had once you realize the walls erected between you and your enjoyment of the game. Having multiple slopes with wonderful designs and an upgrade system that feels like you’re actually training the athlete to be better were great touches, but they matter little when you have to fork over cash as the only way to truly stay competitive. If you are willing to pay up, you might end up with the Okay experience still, but such a clear delineation in the game’s quality between paying and non-paying players and little honesty in how much that will effect the game makes for a gross profit model, especially in a game brimming with ads already. If the game had used alternate means of making its money like more optional but beneficial ad watching, potential brand sponsorships, and potentially even locking certain things completely away from free accounts like cheap special slopes or competitions, it could still earn the game money without completely hurting the game’s design. For the ski jumps themselves, a bit more control over the jump with a greater possibility of failure would make success more gratifying and could sustain the game enough that people might be interested in spending on the optional content, since right now, the real money purchases mostly seem to exist to skip a game that has such simple offerings that skipping everything just leaves you with an empty shell of an experience.

Funnily enough, for a game that bills itself as Ski Jumping Pro, this affair hardly feels professional at all. The jumping is too simplistic, and the attempts to squeeze cash from players is clumsy and shameless. If you have airplane mode on though, you can at least experience what few good things this game does without having to face its self-inflicted corruption.