not a huge fan of simulators but i had this so it was part of my quest to finish all my physical gamesn and tbh this game has aged surprisingly well obviously these were always aiming for realism but there was only so much you could do back then and at that line where one must start faking what could not yet be redender gt4 has some really nice aesthetics the lighting is very moody the backgrounds while very 2 dimensional are very detailed I am honestly surprised how well this holds up. what hasn't aged well is the automatic system though lol it kind of shits itself often

actually played this quite a bit in beta and then some more when it got given away for free as someone who didn't expect this to be the next ssx and didn't pay money for it I did enjoy my time its kinda of a laid back snowboarding (and other snow sports) game the lack fo a proper campaign did make it feel very aimless though you're just doing challenges and they get harder? sometimes but not really idk definitely missing something because some guy at Ubisoft thought this should be a live service game that goes on forever until Ubisoft closes the servers and you cant play it all

honestly how i got this game is a more interesting story than the game itself...
I was looking to buy time splitters for the PS2 on ebay and I found a copy for dirt cheap like 2 euros (remember when you could get games on eBay for cheap...) so I bought it but I had forgotten I let my dad use my ebay account a few days before so it had his card attached it wasn't a big deal but I didn't want it to charge my dad's card and him thinking I am pulling one over on him or something so I canceled the order and tell the guy I will buy it again just with a different card he cancels the order but he never relists the game so I just don't buy it but lo and behold a week later the game shows up in the mail its the time splitters case but inside the case its army man air attack this game so to this day I am not sure what actually happened like did he cancel the order but send it anyways but with another game to troll me? or was it a scam all a long and he was never gonna send the right game? personally I don't think so I think this was just someone who didn't know they had the wrong game and sent it anyways but that's mostly because I don't want to assume malice given 1 he did cancel the order 2 it was a 2 euro game it wasn't like time splitters was this rare expensive game at the time I ended up getting a loose time splitters disk afterward but I never got a case for this game but oh well.

As for this game itself, it was actually kind of fine a short toy helicopter game on the PS1 with a little bit of personality but the frame rate thought is just terrible omg

I think a lot of the discourse of this game will probably be around whether or not this is a walking sim which I really don't care about, but if I had to lean one way or the other I would say combat is so few and far between in this game that it might as well be a walking sim.
Anyway, I thought the story was ok I think it being a sequel it loses a lot of the uniqueness factor the original had and the story can be quite predictable I knew exactly how it would end the moment Evil Ryan Gosling started talking about his dad and just knowing the allegories this game series is going for so it was still an enjoyable ride but it's kind of like riding the big scary rollercoaster ...for a second time.
Visually the game looks great at times with some cool twists on fairly realistic locations but this day-one release does seem to have some issues ANTS on people's faces and random pop-ins being the worst and most noticeable ones.