Plenty of games release into Early Access or your system-equivalent nowadays, and it can be a turn-off for some. The more interested I am in a game, the less likely I’ll play early so that when I do play it I get the complete, tailored experience (How I look forward to Slay the Spire 2 1.0…).

On an evening of co-op and party-game style romping with my usual group of 6 players, Double Fine’s new game Kiln let us down (More on that another time…) and we picked up the first game we saw on Game Pass that supported enough players: Sledding Game.

Weird Little Guys: The Videogame

Sledding Game’s premise is pretty much all in the name, at least for now. You drop into a P2P server (So have someone around who can host) and your little froggy bodies plop into the snow in front of a ski sledding lodge. There’s a few different creatures to play as when you start, and some basic controls to learn, but other than that you’re set to start wandering.

Seeing little froggy eyes and little bear butts jiggle their way through the snow is always fun, especially when you know they’re your mates on mic with you. Not seeing them and then having them dome you at 200mph with a sled to the back of the head while you’re preparing a slope is also an experience.

There’s new characters to romp around with and an insane amount of sleds, sled trinkets and placeable gear to unlock, all within the same low-poly style and with wacky designs (One sled is, for example, a Coffin).

Plenty to do for multiple player types

The core loop, if you can really define it, in Sledding Game is based around getting generic “points” that you can cash in for new sleds, gamble with at The Lodge, or spend on unlocking placeable gizmos and decorations. These points can mainly be earnt through a Tony Hawk’s style combo system, making your sled get airtime or speed bonuses frequently enough. Cap it all off with a Perfect Landing and one of my lot earnt 11k points in a good run down the steepest (but shortest) slope in the game.

• Finding a spot, putting down a respawn flag and then tricking the slope out with kickers, speed boosts and bowling pins (which keep your combo alive when you hit them) appeals to all the planners and min-maxers out there.

• Exploring the mountain and uncovering new playable species appeals to puzzle-solvers and wanderers (As well as people who like yeeting snowballs).

• There are race points that group everyone nearby up and set a specific end goal, awarding a few thousand points based on your position which could appeal to the more competitive and instant-action style players.

• For people who want to experience everything, there’s a pretty good spattering of content. It’s not GTA or Red Dead Redemption, but for a cheap lil hangout game it has enough going for it that you can comfortably enjoy it as a larger group.

Plenty of room to grow in the future

The main drawback of Sledding Game is the unfinished nature of it. Some minigames will say they are just not done yet, and don’t have the full mechanics implemented yet.

Also, there’s a limit of 10 placeable items per player. This makes sense to try and keep the server from dying, but in our party that meant there was a limit of 60 items total. However, it assigns them 10 per player. I was doing most of the building in our session, and if I could have had 60 items out myself we could have made some truly spectacular courses.

Since you’re likely to be on with friends, not randoms, and since the build limit would technically let us go up to 60, it’s strange that it doesn’t give players the agency to decide “Okay, you go build and we don’t care if you use all 60 slots, we don’t want to build anyway”. Instead, the builder has to rope in someone else to help with their 10 slots to build grander projects.

Obviously that can foster that cooperative spirit, but some players simply won’t care about that aspect of the game and it’s a shame to lose those building slots on a server due to a simple player preference.

A perfect backup game for when s*&t hits the fan

If you have a regular session with a larger group of gamers and need something quick to install, easy to learn and fun to experiment in then Sledding Game is perfect for keeping on the back burner. When a new friend-focused “Return to the lobby with your freinds and all make pots together” multiplayer brawler doesn’t support private matches and so can only actually have you and 3 FRIENDS ON AT A TIME SCREW YOU DOUBLE FINE-

…you’ll have Sledding Game to fall back on. When Dota is down for maintenance or CoD is downloading shaders, give your squad a slope to barrel down.