Steep Review

Review Steep | You know why Ubisoft is one of my favorite publishers? They continuously bring out new experience, only looking at Xbox One we had The Division, The Crew and Watch Dogs. Risk taking moves is the only way to be successful and that’s something that Ubisoft does really well.  Speaking about taking risks, it’s something you’ll do a lot while playing Steep. Let’s see what I think about this new extreme sports game. 

THE GOOD

• First of all I just have to start by saying that Ubisoft Annecy are technical wizards.  Fast travel is instant and doesn’t require loading times. It doesn’t matter if you want to spawn miles away from your current position. How they managed to do this is beyond me but it’s incredible impressive, especially if you consider how good-looking the game is too!
• Steep is by far the best looking sports game on Xbox One, the mountains are massive and full with little details. You have little villages, pine forests, avalanche breakers and so much more. What makes it even more impressive is the great lighting engine. Looking at those white pine trees and how the sun goes through it.. simply breath-taking beautiful.
• Having a good sense of speed will only work with perfect performance and Steep doesn’t disappoint with that. Not once did I experience slow down or frame rate issues, it really plays as smooth as butter.
• The best sport in Steep is without a doubt wingsuit flying. The challenges can become difficult (I still curse the Fallen Rocks event) but so much fun! High speed and flying low against the mountains are impressive and some of the most adrenaline gameplay I have played in a long time.
• Seeing other players gliding from a mountain is a real sight to behold, Steep is a typical multiplayer game that you want to play for 30 minutes and end up looking at the clock four hours later. Calling in a sick day so you can spend some more time with your friends trying to break that high score. With some nicely found ideas, like instant replays and making your own trick score sections, the game has some replay value.

Mixed Feelings

• Timing for having good jumps from ramps isn’t the easiest thing to do.  You’ll have to replay scoring challenges frequently because you missed your timing. The controls aren’t the most fluent either. (Luckily restarting a challenge is instant, no loading times!)

THE BAD

• The mountain challenges and events are ridiculously hard to navigate. It’s a great idea to see a full-scale world map with all the events but there is absolutely no easy way for simply selecting them all. It’s frustrating to search for new unlocked challenges and when multiple challenges are in one area it’s hard to select the one you want. So weird that the developer didn’t add a list of all the events…
• Wingsuit Flying is awesome, snowboarding and skiing is fun but paragliding is one big yawn. I didn’t really had a clue how it worked, even now after playing with it for a few hours I still don’t fully understand how it works.  Going up or down is still one big confusing mechanic. Reaching a fast enough time for Gold Medals in this sport seems impossible for me.
• I did not lower the score for this but I decided to add this for every game that has lame achievement art. How hard can it be to give achievements the art design that they deserve? We, as Xbox gamers do NOT want lazy Trophy copy/paste!

Score:  82% | Steep is a remarkable performance from Ubisoft Annecy, performance and graphic are really impressive. Creating your own challenges and sharing it with the online community gives quite a lot of replay value. It’s a shame that one-fourth of the game, the paragliding is really boring, luckily the three other sports make up for that.