A fast and fresh journey through a gargantuan extreme sports playground.
Exploring the expansive, frozen Alps of Steep by means of snowboarding, skis, paragliding, or wingsuit is to tour one of the most diverse and visually interesting open worlds I’ve ever gotten lost in - especially in a sports game. Not all of the featured activities are equally fun, and I was disappointed in the lack of statistical customization, but the array of challenges and their satisfying physics that strike a nice balance between realistic and arcadey rarely left me without something new and exciting to try.
Steep is based around a “Play Your Way” philosophy that, in the short term, works well. You can pick from skiing, snowboarding, paragliding, and wingsuit flying (which are all distinct except that snowboarding and skiing share the same courses) and progress through a number of different skill areas geared toward different playstyles. There are rewards for narrowly avoiding obstacles, pulling off complex tricks, exploration, riding creative routes down mountainsides, and even crashing into things or falling on your face and breaking every bone in your body in spectacular fashion. That one is especially entertaining, much in the same way as watching Homer Simpson repeatedly fall down Springfield Gorge.
The problem is that if you decide you like certain playstyles more than others, it can be very difficult (if not impossible) to level up and unlock new peaks. For example, I decided fairly early on that I didn’t like paragliding at all. Slowly drifting around dangling from a parachute is the least intense, least realistic, and least fun out of the four sports, and is mainly useful for scouting out new ski runs and enjoying the scenery at a leisurely pace. So I played my way, and had a good time… until I hit a point near the end where I was short on XP to unlock the final peak and had to go back and run through all of those paragliding challenges I’d skipped. So it’s really: “Play Your Way Unless You Want to Finish the Game.”
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Carving down the Matterhorn on a snowboard is intense and engaging.
The main element that’s painfully missing from Steep is any kind of stat-based rider customization or progression. While there are hundreds of cosmetic items to unlock, none of them actually change how you ride. XP only serves to unlock new areas, not progress your character or gear, so the board you spawn onto the mountain at Level 1 with feels exactly like the one you unlock for getting a gold medal in the hardest race. Even if Ubisoft wanted to keep the emphasis on player skill, it would have been awesome to unlock some side-grade options, like wider or narrower boards with different handling or the ability to tweak little stuff like binding tightness for different events.
Just about everything else Steep does, thankfully, it does really well. Carving down the Matterhorn on a snowboard is intense, engaging, and at times blister-inducingly frantic. Diving from a hot air balloon to glide across glaciers in a wingsuit competes with any superhero game for speed-induced adrenaline. Skiing feels very accurate in that, like real life, I am not any good at it and always end up going backwards at worrying speeds. At high velocity, I always felt my board/skis/wingsuit did what I wanted it to, but the controls can be fiddly and frustrating when you’re trying to slow down and reorient yourself. It usually took me several tries wiggling the thumbsticks around semi-randomly to get back going forwards again once I’d ended up facing the other way.
The Alps look gorgeous on both the PS4 and a high-end PC with a GTX 1070, though level of detail tricks can sometimes be a little too obvious when you look closely at distant terrain. One of the best things about it is the dynamic terrain deformation, which allows you to leave ruts in the powder as you blast down the slopes. It’s detailed enough that you can see the trail from each individual ski and pole separately. If and when I eventually bit it on a big jump, the area where my head skidded through a snowbank remained clearly identifiable.
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The map is just awe-inspiringly gargantuan.
The map is also just awe-inspiringly gargantuan – it can take a good 15 minutes at full clip to board or ski from its highest summit to the furthest edge, and that’s if you take a relatively direct route. It’s also filled with a massive number of different terrain types, even though they all fall roughly within the theme of “frozen water on big rocks.” There are jagged ice fields, gradual slopes, sheer rock faces, castle ruins, and quaint resort villages to explore across the handful of mountains, each of which is based on a real-world equivalent (though some creative liberties are taken, such as putting them so close together).
While there’s not much of a storyline to be found, Steep does feature special challenges called Mountain Stories that range from an intimidating plummet down a ruined bobsled track, to a downright goofy hunt through a forest for a singing tree. Along those same lines, in the grandiose introductory cutscenes you see when you unlock a new peak, each of the major mountains is given a distinctive personality and a human voice. Ortles is inspirational and speaks in a slow, grandfatherly manner, while Aiguille Verte sounds like she’s going to hide in the back seat of your car and murder you. It comes across as slightly unnecessary, but I couldn’t help but chuckle at the charming absurdity of the concept from time to time. It was certainly a nice break from being reminded that Red Bull™ and GoPro™ wanted to see my sick moves at the next The North Face™ Invitational, which is the other kind of storytelling Steep regularly engages in.
One of the flagship features of Steep is its multiplayer integration, in which other players will dynamically appear in your instance of the Alps and allow you to easily group up with them and compete in any of the challenges (which also have global leaderboards). There’s also a system for sharing recordings of your best runs, which can be replayed in a variety of camera modes. They’re the kind of features that don’t do much for me, honestly, since I’m more of a solo player in this type of game. But they’re likely to spawn some popular clips on Reddit from people who are far better at virtual snowboarding than I’ll ever be, and that’ll give Steep some extended life. To its credit, none of these multiplayer integrations came across as intrusive or annoying. All the sharing and grouping functionality can be easily ignored if, like me, you just want to be left alone in the cold.
The Verdict
I enjoyed just about every minute I spent playing Steep. Grandiose, attractive environments serving as the backdrop to varied, intense challenges are enough on their own to make this wintry playground somewhere I was always delighted to go back to and spend more time in - a feeling I still have even after finishing the bulk of the content, though the lack of mechanical customization and progression makes it harder to find reasons to return. Likewise, the core snowboarding and skiing events are enjoyable enough to easily forgive mediocre elements, like the slow and sleepy paragliding mode, that feel like needless gimmicks. I just wish the latter weren’t mandatory.
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