Fresh Tracks – PS5 Review

From Vancouver-based developer and publisher Buffalo Buffalo we have the latest rhythm action game on PS5, in this case Fresh Tracks.  We have to confess, we hoped the dev name was in fact the grammatically correct sentence “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” but sadly not.

To quote the Steam product page, “Fresh Tracks is a thrilling music-action game on skis. Take on obstacles and menacing enemies as you ski further into the darkness that has befallen the snow-covered land of Norwyn.”

Practically this is akin to a blend of the fallen out of favour games of yore such as  Guitar Hero, Rock Band or lesser-known entries like Music Racer for example. You might even get flashbacks to Tetsuya Mizuguchi joints like our beloved Rez, Child of Eden or more recently Tetris Effect.

You see, your aptitude, or lack thereof in our case has a bearing on how the music pans out. Hit all the beats, you’ll get a good rating as well as have glorious complimentary notes spilling from your speakers. However, unlike a more typical rhythm action game, you only really have to get by largely unscathed.

When you begin a run, you have to choose from the songs available to you, these are randomly allocated with difficulty from easy, medium and hard to expert and in our case certainly, are the biggest barrier to progression here.

At the beginning, your starting narrator, otherwise known as a mythic in game lore, is a lady named Koda who makes life a little easier and more forgiving for you and while it might be tempting to go with the other mythics once you’ve unlocked them, we’d recommend you stick with her until you’ve got the hang of things. Or not in our case.

You move with the d-pad and were it not for the fact you had to lean with and and swing your sword with the right stick. The easy difficulty level songs show up at the start of the run and it can feel a bit arbitrary when you get through with relative ease only to fail at the next stage.

Despite that, we felt compelled to try again multiple times during our playthroughs. We managed to beat the first boss after a few attempts. This unlocked Sogvar who as well as sounding a bit like Stellan Skarsgård makes for a slightly more challenging time than Koda. He also prefers Heroic type tunes as opposed to Inspiring tunes like Koda does.

A successful run and hence a trophy comprises three main stages and a final boss of sorts. At least that’s what we can piece together from the trophy descriptions as we’ve not managed to get past the second story song of the second stage despite trying repeatedly.

There’s only so many times we can face repeated failure in a game without any yield. As a result, our playtime with Fresh Tracks has been a bit like our experience with the Dark Souls series in that we play for a while, have genuine fun and then remember why we last stopped playing.

It’s OK though, we’re mature enough to realise that not every game is going to be to our taste so we can still make some kind of objective judgment here.

Play a Story Song once and you’ll unlock it for practice later in what is penned The Lark. You’ll need the in-game currency that persists after runs to access them and the devs would have you practice over and over again. But when this practice mode has no bearing on your progress otherwise, there’s little incentive to do so.

The best practice being to commence an actual run and get the permanent currency (aka ekkos) regardless of if you fail or not. The songs are great and flow really well, especially when you get into the zone. So while we fail, we feel like we’re making a little progress each time we do. We even got the best rating on a song a few times, but only the easy ones.

The design here is very well done and incredibly slick, putting many premium games to shame if we’re honest. At a penny under twenty quid this is incredible stuff too. Hours of replay value even though we feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface.

As you might expect, the difficulty is tough and we struggle to see how we will prevail in the short term. We suspect that Buffalo Buffalo would be quite happy if this was the only thing we played going forward. It would certainly benefit from being the only game in town in that regard.

In conclusion, we can appreciate the craft and finesse applied with regards to Fresh Tracks, however the difficulty and commitment required is just that bit too much for our personal tastes. Going by the trophy unlocks on a tracking site, we’re not the only players that haven’t got particularly deep here. There’s no denying that this game is wonderful though, so if you’re into rhythm action games, this is probably your thing.