One of the more highly-anticipated games around TA finally launched this week with Built By Snowman’s Alto’s Adventure ($4.99). The game has been highly praised for its beautiful art, which has caused it to gain a lot of traction and even get coverage on several media outlets that don’t normally cover video games. It’s definitely striking enough to have a mainstream appeal, and I myself have to confess that I’m constantly being stricken by the game’s beauty. However, as a long-time gamer and someone who has played more side-scrolling endless runners than I can count, I admit that I was underwhelmed gameplay-wise the first time I took Alto’s Adventure for a spin. It felt like, “That’s it?"

The game boils down to tapping to jump to avoid hazards and catch air off lips or cliffs, and once in the air holding down the screen to rotate and perform backflips. You can also grind by landing on wires that are occasionally strung up in a level, but by and large everything felt very basic. Very very beautiful visually, but very basic mechanically. Each run felt like it dragged on for too long and the game just didn’t feel especially challenging. Still, something about Alto’s Adventure kept beckoning me. I kept playing and replaying, and the more I played, the more it grew on me. It also turned out that the more I played, and the more I read in our forums, I discovered there’s actually some serious depth hidden beneath the oh-so-gorgeous exterior of the game.

For one, as you complete the meta-missions in the game and level up your character, you’ll unlock additional playable characters, each of whom have some type of unique ability that differentiates them from the rest. Then you have the Wingsuit, the most expensive item in the shop. This thing is a total game-changer. Once you activate the Wingsuit, you’re able to glide through the air, and this allows you to string together much larger combos and get a much higher score. Here’s a brief video from forum user App Unwrapper showing off the character Tupa as well as the Wingsuit. Obviously, if you don’t want either of those things spoiled for you, you might want to skip the video.

Pretty neat, right? But it’s not just the additional characters or the Wingsuit that add interesting layers of strategy to the game, but some of the base mechanics are also imperative to master properly if you’re going for that long high-score run. For example, pulling off a backflip gives you a temporary speed burst when you land, and during that burst of speed you’re actually invincible which lets you blast straight through rocks that would otherwise end your run.

Being able to gain speed is also crucial for outrunning the Elders who follow you and try to take you out, or for making some of the more epic jumps across particularly long chasms. Basically, backflips aren’t just cool-looking tricks that score you points, but they are critical elements to playing the game and it’s in your best interest to master them. Here’s another much lengthier video, this time from forum user ThunderChickenFalconHawk (great name!) which shows off how strategically using the abilities in the game can lengthen your run quite a bit.

As I said previously, the more I play Alto’s Adventure, the more I like it, and this continues to be true even as I write this. It’s a deceptively deep game, which got me to thinking “Why didn’t they put things like the Wingsuit earlier in the game so people like me won’t get tricked into thinking the game is boring?" Well, as we discuss on our podcast this week, that is my point of view as a long-time gamer and someone who is intimately familiar with these types of games. And in the world of mobile, people like me aren’t typically the target audience.

Lots of people who aren’t regular gamers are writing about and enjoying Alto’s Adventure, and it could be that had the game thrown all of its intricacies at you at once, it might have been too overwhelming. That’s not a knock on those people at all, it’s just a reality. If you play a lot of console first-person shooters, someone can hand you a controller for the newest Call of Duty game and you’ll jump right in without missing a beat. Hand a console controller to someone who doesn’t really play video games, and they’ll look at you like you just handed them an alien object.

I’m going to say it again: The more I play Alto’s Adventure, the more I like it. Nay, the more I love it. Barring the visuals, it doesn’t leave the greatest first impression to someone who’s played these games before, but it’s absolutely worth sticking to and learning its deeper intracacies. And in fact, I think the progression and learning curve is perfect for the larger portion of the mobile audience it’s trying to cater too. If you weren’t terribly impressed with Alto’s Adventure on first blush, my advice is to keep at it, and eventually try to learn some of the more advanced techniques. This game is definitely more than just a pretty face, and I have a feeling it’s something really special we’ll be talking about and playing for a long time to come.