Skirim
(This
review is spoiler-free!)
My history with skiing is a weird one,
to say the least. I’ve never done it in real life for one specific reason: in
Grade 6, we were going to go on a ski trip. Before we left, the teacher showed
us a video detailing literally everything that could go wrong while skiing. I
can’t remember exactly what happened in it, except at one point a guy fell out
of a chairlift and rolled down the mountain. After that video, I more or less…uh,
lost interest in the sport.
That hasn’t stopped me from playing
winter sports video games from the safety of my couch, though! Steep is a new
game from Ubisoft (booooo!) all about exploring the Alps while performing
stunts and completing challenges. The trailers for it looked neat, but how is
the final product?
Well, I can pretty clearly tell that
I’m not the target demographic for Steep, but even with that I can say the game
is pretty cool for what it is.
There’s really not much to say about
the gameplay. Anyone who’s played games like We Ski (did anyone else play
that?) or the Skate series knows the story here; the game dumps you into the Alps,
and you get to ski. Or snowboard. Or do various flying sports stuff. There’s no
overlying objective or an end goal to get to, aside from some challenges to
complete and more mountains you can visit the higher your level rises.
The first thing you notice upon
booting up the game is that it’s one of the absolute best looking titles released
this year. I’m not kidding, the folks over at Ubisoft have really outdone
themselves in the graphics department. While I’m sure it doesn’t at all measure
up to actually visiting the real thing, Steep allows you to experience the
frosty mountaintops from the comfort of your living room, all rendered with
excruciating detail. As someone who lives surrounded by snow for about half the
year, I can safely say that the game captures how it looks, feels, and
interacts with the other objects in the area.
I’m personally not a fan of sports
games of any kind (or sports in general, for that matter), so Steep didn’t hold
my interest for very long, especially with other, more engaging games to play
nearby. Honestly, to me this is one of those games where you can get just as
much out of it by watching a Let’s Play of it as you can playing it yourself.
But I live in a family of sports-loving people, and they can’t keep their hands
off the game.
Steep’s enormous open world is suited
to host four different kinds of sports, two on land and two in the air. The two
on land are skiing and snowboarding, and they play as you expect. You can tell
that, as these are the main modes of standard point-A to point-B
transportation, Ubisoft put a lot of effort into making sure they control
perfectly. The skiing/snowboarding is responsive and I never had any trouble
controlling it in my entire playtime.
I can’t quite say the same about the
air sports, however. I honestly tried to avoid playing them as often as I
could, they were so irritating. The first is the flying-squirrel suit, which
controls similarly to the Wing Cap in Mario 64. On its own, it can be used just
fine with no issues, but in challenges when you need to fly at a breakneck pace
you often lose control and speed head-first into a tree. One of the earlier
challenges required me to fly in the squirrel suit as low to the ground as I
could get to accumulate points, but I reached a point where I was going so fast
I couldn’t recover in time to avoid the powerlines and hills the challenge
threw at me towards the end. It ultimately took me around ten minutes to beat
an early game challenge that should’ve been a cakewalk.
And don’t even get me started on the
complete joke that is the paraglider. A lawn chair tied to helium balloons
would be easier to fly. It’s mostly only used to fly across large expanses of
land without the risk of crashing that the squirrel suit gives you, and it can
be handy if you only need to go in a straight line. The problem is that in the
paraglider challenges you need to do everything but fly in a straight line, making you flail around uncontrollably
as you attempt to pull around sharp corners and dips, all the while trying not
to crash into the mountain.
There are several options to customize
your skier as well, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. There’s several
different jackets, pants, squirrel suit and parachute designs, but none of them
are really memorable…save for one. There is an unlockable helmet known only as
the Deer Head. Equipping the Deer Head silences your player character’s default
chatter (pressing X makes him spout some mindless chatter about how excited he
is to be skiing) and replaces it with deer noises. There’s nothing funnier than
watching your deer-headed skier go plummeting off the edge of a mountain while
screaming “MEEEEERRRRRHHHHHH”. It gets me every time.
While I think everybody deserves to
experience the majesty that is Deer Head for themselves, it is kind of hard for
me to recommend Steep overall. It’s the type of game that if you think you’ll
love it or you think you’ll hate it, you most certainly will. I will say that
the target demographic for this game is about the same as the EA Sports and
Tony Hawk titles, not for core gamers like me. If you want a game that’ll give
you a massive world where you can ski to your heart’s content without worrying
about catching hypothermia, Steep is right up your alley. But if you’re like me
and you only have a passing interest in the game, I’d say watch some YouTube
videos of it or give it a rent before you drop money on it. It’s a gorgeous
looking game with great controls, and I actually find it a lot of fun to just
watch my brother play. But if you want more actual stuff to do besides complete
missions, Steep will likely leave you out in the cold.
FINAL SCORE
6/10
Okay
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