Endless Ski is an unabashed ripoff of Skifree (Copyright Microsoft/Chris Pirih, 1991), although some considerable alterations have been made to the game. Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done.
Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. Endless Ski is not really that much better than Skifree... it does have a few alterations, not least of which is some average (but not terrible) 3D graphics thanks to the Unreal Engine.
Gameplay is the same as Skifree... this is an endless runner with a skiing theme, as you dodge the yeti, dogs, go over jumps, avoid trees... you can get and play Skifree for free. It was shipped with the Windows entertainment pack in 1991 so anyone old enough will have played it extensively due to the lack of other games on your typical random Windows 3.x computer back in those days. By todays standards, such an endless runner is a pretty shallow experience and you can get plenty of endless runners for free on mobile app stores and so on... there's really no justification for charging money for one here on Steam.
30 years of advancement in the capabilities of the gaming industry, you could hope they could come up with something better than "Someone else's game without copyright permission, but in 3D".
Usually at this point in the review I'll go into the list of technical defects, but there's not much to say here. Unreal is a pretty good engine for people who know how to use it properly, and the game is well polished and slick enough. The graphics really aren't exceptional but I'm not sure what people expect to see on Skifree. There's some possibility that some of the assets are flipped here, but there's so little to the game visuals that it's hard to say... however, there being so little to the game visuals is a problem in itself, which is why this game isn't getting a thumbs up from me. Although, given the low price, it's a "kindof maybe"... except... you know... so many free endless runners... why pay for one?
The shallowness and low value proposition of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Endless Ski is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
