Steep opens on Mont Blanc, and the first thing it asks you to do is jump off it. Ubisoft Annecy’s debut original game is a winter sports sandbox built around the Alps, and it treats the tallest mountain in Europe as a launch pad rather than a summit.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Four Ways Down Mont Blanc
The four main activities are skiing, wingsuit flying, snowboarding and paragliding. Later downloadable content added rocket-powered wingsuit flying, sledding, BASE jumping and speed riding, and pushed the map out to the Alaska Range, Japan and Korea.
Players switch between disciplines with a menu wheel. The world is shared, online, and everyone in it is doing something at the same time. You can collide with other players unless you turn that off in the settings.
A Pair of Binoculars and a Mountain View
Steep does not hand you a course list. It hands you binoculars. Hidden races, challenges and areas sit in the world waiting to be spotted and unlocked, and the mountain view mode reveals drop zones that act as fast travel points.
That design is the game’s best idea and its worst. The Alps are genuinely vast, and the discovery loop rewards wandering. But a player who wants to be told where to go next will find nothing and no one to ask.
GoPro Angles and a Trick System
Races borrow camera angles modeled on GoPro footage, the result of a sponsoring deal. A trick system lets skiers and snowboarders spin and grab. You can record stunts, share them, and challenge other players to beat your lines and tricks.
- Skiing
- Wingsuit flying
- Snowboarding
- Paragliding
Two expansions went further, letting players take part in the Winter X Games and the 2018 Winter Olympics. Korea’s map uses the actual Pyeongchang venues.
Denali and the Alaska Range
The downloadable content is not a footnote. Alaska centers on Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, and it gives the wingsuit its best terrain. Japan and Korea round out the set.
The Online Requirement Is the Real Problem
Steep is online-focused by design, and most of the game cannot be played without a connection. That was the sharpest complaint at launch, and it has not aged into a virtue. A sports game about solitude on a mountain that refuses to run when the servers do is a contradiction the design never resolves.
The scope criticism lands too, though less cleanly. Ubisoft Annecy built something enormous and then declined to give it a spine. The activities are enjoyable. The graphics hold up. What is missing is direction.
What Ubisoft Annecy Built First
Development began in 2013, and Steep was the studio’s first original game. That shows in the ambition and in the seams. The open world is the achievement. The structure around it is the unfinished part.
Steep is a game you play in the gaps between other games, which is a strange thing to say about something this large. It is at its best when you ignore the challenges entirely, pick a ridge, and go down.
The Verdict on Steep
Steep earns its 7.3. The Alps are worth the trip, the four disciplines give the sandbox real range, and the binoculars-and-drop-zones loop is a smarter way to open a map than a quest log. The mandatory connection and the missing sense of purpose are not small complaints, and no amount of fresh powder covers them.
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