Mark McMorris Infinite Air is an interesting snowboarding game, pushing for more of a simulation game than an arcade title like SSX, it makes the game painfully real, including the amount of time you spend sliding down the mountain on your arse or face.  It is a game that touches on something, but has its deeply rooted flaws too.

The game itself is simple, you have runs to complete to the end.  You will complete five runs including the boss where you board against the likeness of a famous snowboarder.  Each run has five challenges and you need to complete a certain number before you can advance to the next series of runs.  Challenges vary from winning, to completing a certain move on the track or scoring a certain number of points from a specific jump, which while I was skeptical at first on some of the tracks I found myself getting hooked quickly.

The biggest problem in the game and possible issue for most players is its steep learning curve where the biggest lesson is jumps.

It is crucial that players use the tutorial as the game has a knack for the best time to jump and it does not have a button that centres you.  In most snowboarding games generally if you let go of the buttons or change direction you can very easily re-centre to land jumps.  This is not the case in Mark McMorris Infinite Air, it goes for the realistic feel where once you jump your body has its momentum, this can be slightly effected mid-air by crouching or standing, but there is a knack to landing these.

Many hours in I am considerably better than when I started, but there is still a large element of luck every time I try to do a flip based trick on any jump.  This could be a serious detractor for some, but once you start to get the hang of it, the game gets considerably more entertaining.  You just need to be willing to put those hours in first.

The game itself is gorgeous and the tracks for the most part look really good, there are some design issues though.  On some runs it is really easy to run off course, especially while you are learning the game.  When this happens it will give you a countdown, which will end the level if you do not get back on course and with the simulation nature of the game it can be very hard to get back on course.

Added this is some interesting issues like an U shaped rock I got stuck in multiple times.  When you crash and choose to get back up it only moves you a tiny distance, this resulted in me spending five or more minutes at times trying to get out of the rock.  You can restart the whole run, but if you do not want to do that you will just have to keep trying and jumping to slowly get out of the situation.

One annoyance was the realistic situation of momentum during or after a crash. This is because it will result in you sliding down the mountain face first.  You can only get up when you are slow enough and sometimes you will slide past many jumps and many objects because of one slip up which was frustrating as hell, especially as sometimes it was beyond excessive.

Aside from the games set tracks, there is a mountain and run creator.  You can create runs on the mountain for others to play, or create your own ones where you modify the environment as well which gets just deep enough to easily lose a couple of hours making a fun track.  This also means there is an extraordinary amount of user generated content so there is even more value in the game thanks to this.  The multiplayer worked fine once you got into the game but it took a few minutes to load each time I played which was unnecessarily frustrating.

All in all, Mark McMorris Infinite Air is a great snowboarding game waiting behind a steep learning curve which does reward if you are willing to sink in the required hours.  It is not the greatest snowboarding game I have played and its realistic elements can result in a lot of frustration, but thanks to the great user generated content there is lots to play on the other side of that learning curve.