Steep is a surprisingly easy game to love. It doesn't hurt to be the first major snowboarding game of the PS4/Xbox One generation – though there's more to Steep than that – and it's hardly a problem being drop-dead gorgeous, with beautiful, crisp visuals and some of the most picturesque alpine scenery you've ever seen.
Yet what makes Steep is its whole approach to the extreme sports genre. While it has the kinds of high-speed races and trick challenges you'd expect, it's also a game of exploration, where you're free to roam far off-piste, climb every mountain and speed down each powder-coated stream.
At first, the map – compressing chunks of four different alpine regions into one fantasy space – seems vast and empty, but the more you play, the more it will reveal. Scan the horizon through your binoculars and you'll discover drop zones, fast-travel points where you can unlock new events and challenges to boost your would-be champs burgeoning reputation and level up.
Simply drop what you're doing and explore the mountain and you'll find more drop zones, each with more events to try. Level up and new events become available, giving you a chance to showcase your talents for the likes of Salomon and Red Bull.
There's more than just snowboarding on offer, too. As a rule, snowboarding events can also be completed on skis, which can be a better bet when speed and distance matter more than daredevil stunts. You can also take to the air, either gliding at near-suicidal speeds close to the mountains in a wingsuit or riding thermals and harnessing the wind in the more gentle paraglider.
You can leap from the peaks or jump from a floating hot air balloon, and either enjoy a quiet descent over the mountaintops and through the valleys or go for the red hot thrills of speeding at a fatal velocity just a few nerve-wracking metres above the ground.
Steep, you see, is happy to let you have things at your own pace. Some events will push you to reach the bottom of a run before the competition or notch up the highest score from your tailgrabs, spins and flips, but others will simply ask you to make your way from point to point around a mountain, make a steady ascent by glider or follow a mysterious friend down the slopes or through the skies.
There are (literally) breakneck escapades aplenty, where you can try to negotiate a glacial ice-field at speed or zoom through arches and tunnels in your wingsuit, but also more tactical cross-country events, where you need to work out the most efficient way to get from the start point to the finish. You can mix things up or find an activity to match your mood. Whatever you do, it's adding to your experience and your in-game profile.
The minute-by-minute gameplay is strong as well. Both the skis and snowboard handle beautifully, with a great sense of speed and a convincing feeling that you're moving fast across different grades of snow and ice. Downhill races are exciting while the trick challenges hit the right tension between epic, painful-looking failure and the promise of a big score if you can only pull that perfect wildcat followed by a frontside rodeo off. The wingsuit events are challenging but white-knuckle thrilling, and if riding the paraglider takes some getting used to, there's something graceful and relaxing about it once you do.
The problem with Steep, however, is that, while you may well love it, that love begins to fade with time. Partly, this comes down to niggling irritations. The 3D map, for a start, is hard to navigate, often making it unnecessarily awkward to find your next event. The rest of the UI isn't much better, turning simple character customisation into a bit of an ordeal.
At some points your character seems stuck to a wingsuit launch platform when they should be leaping off it, while at others they'll start an event facing the wrong way. We also found numerous occasions where we'd get trapped on, behind or even partway through a rocky outcrop or large boulder. Nothing a quick restart can't fix, but annoying all the same.
Mostly, though, it comes down to the over-familiarity that grows with time. While the quest for new drop zones and new events will keep you coming back for a good few hours, it's not long before you notice that one mountain and one set of events isn't actually that different from those that came before, and that while the routes keep growing more difficult, with more awkwardly-placed checkpoints or obstacles to get through, that's the only way in which the game seems to be progressing. Steep is a good thing, but you'll probably have had enough of it all too soon.
That's a shame, because it gets the look and feel of its alpine scenery and winter sports spot on, and the open-world exploration is fantastic. There's really nothing here that a good patch and some decent DLC couldn't fix, but Steep needs a little more to keep you out on the slopes, not heading back for the apres-ski.
Verdict
Steep gets nearly everything right – it looks great, plays well and has the sort of depth and exploration you'd expect from one of Ubi's open world games. It has some really irritating foibles, but nothing you can't live with.
What it lacks is that special something that keeps the action fresh and the kind of compulsive, obsessive hook that would have you coming back for more. It's a beautiful extreme sports game, but oddly forgettable.
Steep release date: December 2, 2016
Available on: PS4 (tested), Xbox One and PC
Developer: Ubisoft Annecy
Publisher: Ubisoft
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