After so many major titles have been leaked before the show, Steep was a nice surprise at the end of Ubisoft's presentation. It's really nice to see just a new IP anyway, especially in a genre that hasn't been given the attention it deserves in the past few years. The revival of SSX failed to hold onto the gaming world's attention, and it's about time for something else to bring skiing, snowboarding, and extreme winter sports back into the fray. It's not really that… steep… of a hill to climb, right? Eh?
(I am not ashamed of that pun. Even when I should be.)
Steep brings together not only skiing and snowboarding, but paragliding and base jumping in those flying squirrel/wingsuits. The world is beautiful, featuring both the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc (real places!), covered in craggy cliffs and untouched snow (that retains any carvings made from feet or skis or boards. Every view is reminiscent of watching the real thing on a Go Pro… which makes sense, since their branding is dotted on helmets, clothing, and the appearance of the actual cameras on character model's heads.
With the clarity of the visuals it's even more impressive just how fast everything was flying by, though maybe not as impressive as the slow or stationary views provided throughout. In the demonstration, a paragliding character was stopped on a ride and appreciated the view. And damn, what a view.
The extreme skiing and snowboarding look to perform just as one might expect them to—namely hopping across moguls or leaping off cliffs, twisting, and contorting to perform kickass tricks before you reach the snow again. There is a points total, so it's likely there will be high-score challenges along with speed challenges. It's been made clear that you can challenge your friends to such challenges, then share your biggest achievements and scariest crashes. Good times for everybody!
There haven't been many truly noteworthy extreme sports games that have come to mind since the heyday of the PS2 and the turn of the century (Tony Hawk: RIDE comes to mind for one example, and that should stop coming to anybody's mind). It's about time for a resurgence of the genre, and from the look and speed alone, Steep may be just the boost necessary to make such a genre viable again. Or, we could find out that the Tony Hawk franchise was a temporary fad.
The days of craving crazy-twist-flippage that brought us duds like BMX XXX and Skydiving Extreme (along with the lovely Alpine Racer 2 in arcades) are gone now. It's time to see if we really still crave some of that adrenaline rush of flying down a mountain, this time in more ways than have been possible before.
Only time will tell, and we have until December of this year (unless delayed, of course) which is plenty to figure out if it's something we really still want on our PS4s. I, for one, am excited, and I know I'm not the only one, but it's a mass audience that needs to be pumped, not just me. There's something thrilling about leaping into the air at high speeds above fresh powder that makes a person want more, so we'll see if Steep can scratch that itch.
