Steep

even a sports game has a mission where you follow someone

Ubisoft/5

Snowboarding and skiing are very fun (aside from the g-force crap) but way too many horrible dull missions with the parachute. Hilariously awful UI too I've pretty much beat the game and still don't understand how the menu works lol

I have a love-hate relationship with this game. For one, it looks absolutely stunning, and the mountain is detailed and expansive with plenty of paths for all the different snow sports. This is contrasted by a severe lack of content and some of the most confusing UI choices I've seen in a video game. The controls are interesting to say the least but there understandable in context of the gameplay.

I play Steep to chill out, with my headphones in listening to music, and the annoying ass voice lines turned off. In that regard, I'd say I got my money's worth.

Steep is a strange game. It's got all the faults of most big Ubisoft titles – bad currency systems, grind-y progression and intrusive UI. This is admittedly unsurprising, given the company's output around the games' release. But what Steep shares with those other games, is a stunning open world of beautiful vistas – a playground for extreme sports.

While I can't speak for how well the feeling of cutting through the thick layers of snow on the slopes of Mont Blanc is recreated – I've never been – but it certainly feels good to me. The main mechanical tension lies in the g-force system. The faster you go, the more difficult it becomes to retain control of your character. Suddenly every little bump poses a great threat. For snowboarding and skiing, this mostly works like a charm.

In true Ubisoft fashion however, Steep doesn't know when to stop. It is a perfectly capable – dare I say great – snowboarding game that serves up som arcade-y fun with just enough simulation to give the player a sense of accomplishment when sticking the landing after a long drop down the rocky mountainsides of Alaska, or slaloming through the cherry blossom in Japan.

But then there's the wingsuit, and the sled, the paraglider and the rocket powered wingsuit. I don't want to waste too much time on these because they're just not that fun, and doesn't really take advantage of the setting at all. There are a few rock formations and ski lifts that are cool to fly through once, but that's it. Soaring above the slopes never comes close to the thrill of navigating them. And the sled mostly seems like a joke inclusion. It's awful to control and you'd probably have to put hundreds of hours in to be able to steer it well enough to make it safely down any mountain. Why you would do that is beyond me, but to each their own.

I love the world of Steep for what it is to me, but I dislike what it is to the characters that inhabit it. The shun shining through the snow as it falls over the fir trees, with the quiet ambience only amplifying the carving sounds that has accompanied the thrill of winter sports for many. It's the combination of nostalgia for ski trips with my family and a freedom to explore that is unmatched by other winter sports games. But to my character it's a constant Red Bull-fueled, X-games like extreme sports festival. Too often are the stunning vistas tainted by big colorful blocks and flags signaling that this isn't a place for tranquility, but for putting on a show, supported by the constant screams of the character whenever any air is achieved, and big numbers are constantly telling me how good I'm doing. Good, is going fast and doing tricks, not vibing.

Still, pushing through the UI (I'll admit that I eventually turned it all the way off), Steep can offer a snowboarding and exploratory experience that is incredibly refreshing, where the mountains are the real stars. It's an open world that is neither violent, nor filled with cars, and that seems to be quite rare. It's an open world that (mostly) shows great respect for nature, emphasizing how small we are in comparison. And for that, I love it.

Steep already looks and feels bland enough to play as-is; I don't get a sense of weight and feeling from the tricks, and it all makes me want to play SSX instead. The open-world stuff is okay, but not my thing, and only serves to keep me playing longer than I otherwise would have ever considered. The unlockables aside from the more bright and garish ones, including costumes, almost don't matter, and I certainly can't care about what anyone else is wearing (unless they're wearing fucking costumes obscuring my camera) because I'm going to be going down the mountain anyway. Only in paragliding and wingsuit jumping (sort of) does it really get a chance to show off to me, and no one else will notice so why even bother? And while controls are fine on mouse + keyboard, I'm sure it'd feel marginally better on controller.

But what really kills the game is the G-Force meter, removing any sense of speed, momentum, and fun from the game. Steep gets borderline unplayable with this. Whenever I land from anything but small jumps, all my momentum gets killed and I have to build it up all over again. Why have freestyle tracks when I'll just feel miserable every single time I land a trick? It's baffling, and very quickly sucks any motivation I have to play the game away. I want to play this game to do cool tricks and go fast, and if even fairly-sized ramps are going to make both of those a chore, then why even bother? This isn't worth the price of free.

Steep is a shitty game. It was so, so close to being good. But Ubisoft hates the idea of making a "videogame" and hates the idea of people having "fun". There is nothing wrong with the controls, let's put that out there. The game controls just fine.
The main problem with Steep is in its "g-force" system. When you launch off a big jump, even if you land perfectly, your g-force meter decreases. If this meter hits zero, your character will faceplant into the snow. Ubisoft doesn't want you to have fun. You've got to either baby hop the jumps, or rest after every jump. It's absolutely ridiculous that they'd include freestyle trick competitions and punish you for trying to do tricks.
Faceplanting wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't leave you tumbling down the fucking mountain for ten minutes every time. If you fall down, there's nothing you can do until your character comes to a stop. I don't care if you want to tell me it's "realistic", this is a VIDEOGAME.
The game also loves to cancel whatever event you're doing for dumbass reasons. Paused the game? Event cancelled. Stopped in place? Event cancelled. Spent "too much time" going the "wrong way"? Event cancelled.

The map screen is fucking awful. I hated Skyrim's map when that game came out, but Steep's map makes Skyrim's look amazing in comparison. I've always hated looking down on the actual world rather than a map, but Steep takes it to a new level. The camera is way too zoomed in, and events only appear when your cursor is in the same zone as them. The cursor also snaps to events from way too far away. If two events are too close to eachother, good luck getting your cursor off the one you don't want it to be on.
Also, regular menus are fucking terrible. Instead of being like every other console game ever, Steep's menus are just PC menus, but the mouse cursor is controlled by the analog stick. It's absolutely disgusting.

Steep is a shitty fucking game that could be turned into a good game with a single patch. The flaws are incredibly easy to fix, but Ubisoft won't do that. Instead, I now own a fun frisbee.