Steep – Warning: icy reception ahead
Being the pun-lovers that we are, we were quite looking forward to typing the following: “due to a lack of content, Steep is named after its asking price”. Couldn’t justify it though. The reality is there’s an insane amount of gnar to shred in this expansive, mountainous world, and you can do it as either a snowboarder, skier, paraglider, or wingsuiter. Sounds great, but this is actually the end of the good news. Steep goes downhill from here…
If you’re going into this purely as a lover of snowboarding games — a once-popular genre that’s faded into obscurity — you’re gonna have a bad time. Snowboarding in Steep is nowhere near as fluid as it ought to be. The trick system feels unnatural, and, unless you’re bombing down the 45 degree slopes of the Matterhorn, the general sense of speed is anaemic. Carving left and right through cliffs or obstacle-filled villages feels like your character has arthritis of the hips.
Steep also won’t let you pre-wind flips or spins when you’re charging up for a tricktastic jump. Instead, you simply yank on the left stick, post-launch, at which point your rider presumably uses the Force to generate 2900 degrees worth of spin out of thin air. It takes a while to click, and even when it does… yeah, still feels odd.
Not having a pleasurable snowboard experience is a big strike against this package, and the situation sure doesn’t improve when you abandon your plank for a parachute (note: at any point you can switch disciplines, which is great). Paragliding sounds lovely on paper, but in practice it’s about as appetising as earwax. It’s the Driving Miss Daisy of extreme winter sports. The first few times you do it, you’ll languidly float through a series of checkpoint rings, trying to take advantage of updrafts. In the end you’ll rage at the bullshit Gold medal time requirements and avoid these events like venereal disease. We’d have taken “toboggan down the mountain in a garbage bin” as a discipline over this.
Fortunately, Steep is saved by its last two options. Being allowed to ski in a video game is incredibly rare, and the novelty-factor of it lasts for hours. Better yet, the jankiness of navigating the world with a snowboard feels considerably reduced here, and the ability to tuck in and hug your poles increases the sensation of velocity. Awkwardness of the trick system notwithstanding, we happily abandoned snowboarding completely in favour of skiing. If you’d have told us that was going to happen going in, we wouldn’t have believed you.
When you get sick of being on the ground, smacking into trees and doing your best Sonny Bono impression, Steep is actually quite fun in the air. Trudge up to any peak (or fast travel for a price) and you may cosplay as a sugar-glider and then throw your stupid self off a cliff. Barreling through narrow canyons as a human meteor requires balls of steel, and the deft use of your left thumb. The closer you press your nose to the jagged rocks beneath you, the more points you earn. Also, the frustration of repeated failure is mitigated by two things: fast retries, and the most hilarious ragdoll system since Skate’s “Hall of Meat”.
Once you’ve picked the discipline you like, you can free-roam across a massive landscape, discovering ‘drop zones’ with your binoculars (which will then spew out a tonne of events). Some of these are timed attack runs, others are score-based, almost all of them feel like repetitive busywork in no time. A fairly aimless grind soon creeps in where you’ll build your player level by half-assedly silver-medalling your way through cookie-cutter events. Once in a while you’ll uncover a mountain challenge with refreshingly unique objectives. Unfortunately, these moments are bookended with eye-rolling cutscenes where the mountain speaks to you, like you’ve wandered into a cheeseball Disney movie from the 1990s. It’s… weird.
Speaking of odd decisions, this is an online-only MMO for reasons nobody can legitimately explain to us. You can’t turn this on and have a soulful experience of just you versus a gorgeous Mother Nature. Ubisoft thought it’d be a much better idea to mar what is, up until this point, a beautifully rendered world with a sea of gamertags and trolls wearing stupid attire. Prepare to be inundated with “join” requests from SpoogeBoarder69, the moron wearing a giraffe onesie who follows you everywhere, spamming his emote that sounds like a squeezy chew toy. Mercifully, player collisions are off by default. Why you’d ever want it set to ‘on’, outside of a match with mates, is beyond us. The aforementioned is only fun in the short term, even in the most ideal buddy conditions.
When you get right down to it, Steep is snow good for a lot of reasons. Having a plethora of stuff to do is all for nothing if it’s just a blizzard of deja vu. If you don’t have an overarching narrative thread that keeps the player’s progression compelling, you’re going to freeze them out in no time. And here’s the biggest kicker: when your snowboard handling feels stiffer than any grab… man, that’s a crying shame that legit makes us misty. As far as design pitfalls go, Steep has many crevasses for you to fall into. Until some serious patching gets rolled out, give this the cold shoulder.
6/10
Posted in Blog, Games
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