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Being the second snow sport game I have played this year, I was hoping that Steep would fill in the areas the other title left missing.  Strangely it almost filled it in with a slightly less sim gameplay, but really impressed me with aspects I had no interest in before, making Steep the game I did not know I wanted.

Steep takes place on some mountains in the Alps, where you have an insane amount of freedom.  In fact, you do not choose the events to play from a list.  Instead you travel to where it starts and then take part in the event.  There is a quick travel feature and as you unlock events, by either getting close to them or through progression, you go to mountain view where you can select and quick travel to an event.

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The game does not just pressure you to do events, but encourages free roaming your way down the mountain and in the first hours of playing the game, I had an extraordinary amount of fun doing just that.  Because they are not self-contained tracks, there are no boundaries to get in the way or to remove the fun, instead the mountains are ready to explore.  During exploration you can stop and use binoculars to look around and if you are close enough to an undiscovered drop point you can unlock them.  Personally I found this a chore and chose more fun ways to unlock them like using the glide suit from a higher point.

Going into Steep I knew that you can use four different means to traverse the mountain, the paraglide, the glide suit, the snowboard and skis.  I was only interested in the latter two and was not looking forward to the glide suit or the paragliding but after a few hours in I was surprised at how much fun the glide suit was, though I am still not a fan of the paragliding.   The glide suit encourages you to get close to objects and the ground to rack up points, which can get tricky, but is really fun.  The paraglide does still have the same kind of challenges as the others but I found it was slow and boring at best, so only liked using it in free roam to get from one high peak to another.

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The snowboarding and skiing are both solid.  You will not be doing outrageous tricks like in the SSX games, but it does not try to be too much of a sim to become a pain.  The most notable of which is the automatic restabilising, which some recent games have chosen to move away from.  When you are doing flips, if you take your fingers off the directional buttons you will move back to the centre point to make a safe landing.  This little detail makes a huge difference on the levels of fun and removes unnecessary frustration.

The game itself is gorgeous and looking down on the mountain before you scale it is a treat.  The game has a day cycle which also creates some beautiful scenes, which you can manually adjust if a certain area you want has too much shadow which I thought was a great little feature.  Adding to the games aesthetic is the way the snow moves.  It always reacts like fresh powder but the trails left behind, especially when walking or climbing,change in appearance so when your character is using their feet or their hands and feet it can look really good.  So much so that I noticed it enough to write here.

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Among the things the game does to remove frustration is the ability to walk.  This means if you are on your board and just overshoot a specific point you can come to a stop, walk the little distance and then go the way you wanted.  As well as this is in free roam you can rewind to any point of your run by going into mountain mode where it has a line for where you have travelled.  It is these minor details that make Steep something special.

As a game, Steep does a lot of things really well, but I cannot help but feel being geared to all four traversal means it stops it from doing one perfectly, a jack of all trades, master of none situation.  Though the variety and freedom definitely gives the game more legs.  If I could take all of the paragliding challenges out and remove the occasional frame rate dip, the game would be so much better.

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Steep (PlayStation 4) Review

Released: December 2016
Rating: PG
Platforms: PlayStation 4
Genre: Sports
Developer: Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft

4.0Overall Score
Gameplay
Graphics
Audio
Replayability
Reader Rating 0 Votes