Exploring Steep’s Snowy Mountaintops And Extreme Vertical Drops

The first snows of the ski season settled in the valleys around Mont Blanc this week – I know because my dad enjoys checking the webcams that take snapshots of this old family holiday destination. The mountains are soon to be swarming with holiday makers taking to skis and snowboards. I’d wager that fewer are heading into the Alps to partake in a little hang gliding or wingsuit flying.

Given that this is all set on a snowy mountain range in the Alps, it’s actually surprising how much visual variety there is. From Mont Blanc to Tyrol, Aravis and a few other regions, there’s a pretty huge part of the Alps that have been taken as inspiration. Within that, there’s so much beauty, both expected and unexpected. The pillowy white snow is dazzlingly bright as it crunches beneath your board, but as the sun sets, it’s deep oranges that give way to blue tones and darkness. There’s not just plain snow, but deep ravines, treacherous rocky sections, the influence of man with avalanche barriers and little villages. It’s a gorgeous game.

Steep isn’t a skiing holiday simulator, though. Sure, you can gently sweep down a piste if you want and just explore the mountain range, but you’re missing the point. Steep lets you aim for the very limits, grazing the tops of trees as you sail past, weaving through treacherous mazes of rock and ice, pushing off a vertical drop into a dazzling series of flips, spins and grabs.

The controls do take a fair bit of getting used to. The tutorial at the start of the game gives you The basics of getting around and pulling tricks, but there’s plenty of nuance that’s left up to you to discover. You’re told that holding L2 and R2 in a jump will have you grab the skis or board, but it wasn’t clear to me that this was controlling your left and right hands individually. Similarly, it was logic that helped me figure out that, when paragliding, hugging the scenery and cliff faces in particular got me a nice updraft to help me reach even higher and get around the world.

Even with the basics being taught, once you get out into the open world, it’s tough to put some things into practice. I’d constantly struggle to actually jump early enough, and when I did it right, sometimes my stick motions wouldn’t put me into a spin as I expected. Sometimes it clicked, sometimes it didn’t. Practice will make perfect.

At the very least, landing is nice and forgiving; all you have to do is let go early enough and try to have the skis or board underneath you. It’s still incredibly jarring to hit the floor though, and that’s entirely intentional. After all, you might have just dropped 30, 40, 50 metres or more. Steep tells you that hey, that’s a lot of G-forces, smearing the edges of the screen in red and telling you just how much force you put through your character’s body. Keep doing badly, get it wrong and clatter into a tree or rock too fast and you’re “knocked out” and respawn. It’s forgiving, but push it too far and you’re a goner. The most I got was 200G, I think. It feels harsh, like you’re doing something wrong, but it’s actually the game being incredibly forgiving.

What’s impressive as well is the world map. It’s practically seamless as you pan around and zoom in and out, and there’s next to no limits to how far in you can zoom, right down to the kind of camera angle you’d expect in normal play. Not only that, but you can see your trails on the map, showing you what kinds of points you were scoring at that time. Pick a spot on your line and you’re given several options, either to respawn at that spot, view a replay or create one of several kinds of challenge to share online.

That kind of sharing doesn’t feel as deeply ingrained as the presence of other players, though. Though difficult to grasp in a small closed session, the pistes will be alive with others taking part in events, simply tooling around and more. Unless you’re in a group together, they won’t affect your game at all, but from joining the same event and trying to beat the same scores as half a dozen other people, there’s a sense of the same kind of compulsive restart and retry gameplay as in Trackmania Turbo.

Particularly in races against the clock and score attacks, realising that I wasn’t doing well enough had me reaching for the options menu and resetting myself to the start to try again. It’s not as ferocious and manic as Trackmania at its busiest – or at least, we’ll have to wait until the coming two weekends’ betas to see – but it has that same general vibe of seeing other players pop in and race alongside you. Join up with other players in a group, and there might be shades of Burnout Paradise as well.

That’s most felt in the Bone Collector event type, where you have to smash as many G-forces into your character as possible. However, hit up a standard point to point race, challenge your friends to a race through a series of checkpoints, or see who can get the best score in the game’s handful of different scoring categories. I can still see Burnout tucked away in there just a little bit.

Truth be told, it can all feel a little po-faced at times, with that kind of edgy extreme sports vibe, all whooping and hollering as a gruffly voiced director comes over the radio and says you’ve done a good job. Mountain stories can also border on the spiritual, with serene voiceovers as you hare down a particular path. So the sheer silliness in other parts of the game butt up against that. You can unlock a helmet that has a rubber chicken strapped to it or a deer head mask, and your taunts change from being whooping and slightly abrasive put downs to clucking like a chicken or doing your best deer bleat.

It’s the more absurd side of Steep that I like, combined with the kind of competitive drive of chasing after leaderboard high scores, whether it’s against your friends or the world at large. Honestly, I’m still a bit pants at it, but the thing is that I’ll keep trying, failing and digitally dusting myself off to try again. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” says my character after she wingsuited into a rock not more than a few seconds before respawning at the edge of a vertical drop. I don’t even wait for her to stop speaking before I jump off to try again.