Given the title, you'd expect Steep to be a game about soaking things in liquid. You know: like dipping bits of cardboard in jugs of brine.
But no. No no. You see, it's Christmas in a few weeks, and Steep resurrects the once-traditional practice of games publishers using the so-called Jolly Season as an excuse to release their snow games.
They always used to do this even though it hardly ever snows at Christmas in this country, thanks to the dastardly Chinese and their canny global warming hoax. Indeed, it doesn't even snow at Christmas in many places where Christmas is celebrated, such as Australia, ovens, and furnaces.
So why do we even associate Christmas with snow? Is it because Father Christmas lives at the North Pole? That doesn't make sense. The Easter Bunny presumably lives underground in a burrow, but who decorates their home with fake soil and rabbit dung at Easter, other than Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall?
Also, the North Pole is about as far away as you can get from the part of the world where the first Christmas story took place. You know: the Nakatomi Tower in Los Angeles..
But no. No no. You see, it's Christmas in a few weeks, and Steep resurrects the once-traditional practice of games publishers using the so-called Jolly Season as an excuse to release their snow games.
They always used to do this even though it hardly ever snows at Christmas in this country, thanks to the dastardly Chinese and their canny global warming hoax. Indeed, it doesn't even snow at Christmas in many places where Christmas is celebrated, such as Australia, ovens, and furnaces.
So why do we even associate Christmas with snow? Is it because Father Christmas lives at the North Pole? That doesn't make sense. The Easter Bunny presumably lives underground in a burrow, but who decorates their home with fake soil and rabbit dung at Easter, other than Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall?
Also, the North Pole is about as far away as you can get from the part of the world where the first Christmas story took place. You know: the Nakatomi Tower in Los Angeles..
TIME WELL SPENT?
These days, I spend more time watching YouTube than I do regular TV.
In fact, I don't even know who Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is.
I barely watch regular TV at all - most of what I watch is on demand, and then most of that is YouTube stuff. Unfortunately, this does mean that it is quite difficult to avoid the sorts of vile people that YouTube attracts.
And by "vile people" I mean "young people with cameras strapped to their heads who view YouTube as a sort of industrial-scale delivery method for sycophancy and validation, who are vile".
You watch these cynically-groomed, middle class, cosseted, cosmopolitan, millennials viewing the entire planet through a lens, and bleating on about "wanting to make a difference" with their "content", while fannying around the nice bits of North Korea, and the tourist-y parts of Bali, looking for the coolest vegan coffee shops, and bouncing around in their wretched millennial bubbles where everyone is talking to one another through their phone or camera, ignoring the fact that three miles in that direction everyone else is starving and oppressed.
RANTY-RANTY-SCRANT!
"OMG! No time for a social message today, guys - we gotta get down to the beach on our motorised skateboards to Instagram the sunset, and then stay up until 5am in Victor The VW Bus editing the vlog because there was a glitch on the drone footage", and then repeating the same thing the next day, and the next day and the next day and the next day and the next and the next and the...
LOVE ME! NOTICE ME! ACKNOWLEDGE ME! EAT MY CONTENT! EAT IT, PEASANT! EAT MY F@CKING CONTENT! OOOH, SOCIAL ISSUES! LOOK AT HOW CARING I AM! LOOK AT THE REGULATION FASHIONABLE HAIRCUT I'VE GOT! NO WONDER I LOVED NORTH KOREA: THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME TOO. STEEP? THEY SHOULD'VE CALLED THIS GAME SHEEP!! LOL!!!!!! DON'T FORGET TO LIKE, COMMENT AND SUBSCRIBE! I LOVE YOU GUYS!
Of course these people are all coffee addicts, for pity's sake. Most of them look like they're starving themselves to be camera-ready, and consequently are so energy-depleted they'd be dead without caffeine. The girls are little more than a coagulation of YouTube-friendly neuroses held together by an eggshell-thin crust of cosmetics, while the boys are usually a blow-dried quiff stapled to a howling vacuum where a human being was once meant to have been.
Anyway. Steep is a game for them. And to be fair, extreme sports games have always aimed themselves at the same sort of audience. You know: shallow, facile, narcissists, who are drawn - through their dearth of self-awareness - to the sorts of hobbies and pursuits that, they believe, will legitimise them in the eyes of other facile... facile... narcis...
...Deep breath.
So... Steep is a snow game designed for Generation GoPro: snowboarding, skiing, paragliding and wingsuit stuff, on a big, open world mountain range. It's a dressing-up box for a-holes.
CALM DOWN!!!!!!
These days, I spend more time watching YouTube than I do regular TV.
In fact, I don't even know who Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is.
I barely watch regular TV at all - most of what I watch is on demand, and then most of that is YouTube stuff. Unfortunately, this does mean that it is quite difficult to avoid the sorts of vile people that YouTube attracts.
And by "vile people" I mean "young people with cameras strapped to their heads who view YouTube as a sort of industrial-scale delivery method for sycophancy and validation, who are vile".
You watch these cynically-groomed, middle class, cosseted, cosmopolitan, millennials viewing the entire planet through a lens, and bleating on about "wanting to make a difference" with their "content", while fannying around the nice bits of North Korea, and the tourist-y parts of Bali, looking for the coolest vegan coffee shops, and bouncing around in their wretched millennial bubbles where everyone is talking to one another through their phone or camera, ignoring the fact that three miles in that direction everyone else is starving and oppressed.
RANTY-RANTY-SCRANT!
"OMG! No time for a social message today, guys - we gotta get down to the beach on our motorised skateboards to Instagram the sunset, and then stay up until 5am in Victor The VW Bus editing the vlog because there was a glitch on the drone footage", and then repeating the same thing the next day, and the next day and the next day and the next day and the next and the next and the...
LOVE ME! NOTICE ME! ACKNOWLEDGE ME! EAT MY CONTENT! EAT IT, PEASANT! EAT MY F@CKING CONTENT! OOOH, SOCIAL ISSUES! LOOK AT HOW CARING I AM! LOOK AT THE REGULATION FASHIONABLE HAIRCUT I'VE GOT! NO WONDER I LOVED NORTH KOREA: THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME TOO. STEEP? THEY SHOULD'VE CALLED THIS GAME SHEEP!! LOL!!!!!! DON'T FORGET TO LIKE, COMMENT AND SUBSCRIBE! I LOVE YOU GUYS!
Of course these people are all coffee addicts, for pity's sake. Most of them look like they're starving themselves to be camera-ready, and consequently are so energy-depleted they'd be dead without caffeine. The girls are little more than a coagulation of YouTube-friendly neuroses held together by an eggshell-thin crust of cosmetics, while the boys are usually a blow-dried quiff stapled to a howling vacuum where a human being was once meant to have been.
Anyway. Steep is a game for them. And to be fair, extreme sports games have always aimed themselves at the same sort of audience. You know: shallow, facile, narcissists, who are drawn - through their dearth of self-awareness - to the sorts of hobbies and pursuits that, they believe, will legitimise them in the eyes of other facile... facile... narcis...
...Deep breath.
So... Steep is a snow game designed for Generation GoPro: snowboarding, skiing, paragliding and wingsuit stuff, on a big, open world mountain range. It's a dressing-up box for a-holes.
CALM DOWN!!!!!!
STEEPEES
UbiSoft have tried hard to keep Steep as varied as possible.
As well as the expected assortment of GoPro-friendly events, there are also gruelling expeditions - where you're required to reach a distant vantage point by whatever means you desire.
Candidly, I never completed one of these expeditions, because there didn't seem to be any way of doing so without climbing up mountains. Which in Steep is no more challenging than pushing up on the joypad stick for about four hours.
There are also weird "story" stages, where you make your way down, while hearing some cod-hippy mythological stuff about the spirit of the mountain, or something. I don't know. I was never really paying attention to what the woman was saying.
The biggest shocker here for me is that the basic snowboarding doesn't feel like it has evolved much since the days of SSX on the PS2, or Nintendo's 1080 Snowboarding. That's not necessarily a complaint: I always had a soft spot for snowboarding games, and this has the same basic feel.
The graphics - while nice enough - aren't exactly breathtaking; beyond the draw distance, resolution, and that, the main difference between this and the snowboarding games of yore is in the amount of content on offer. This is the UbiSoft map-mopping model applied to an extreme sports sim, and it works just fine.
Well... sort of...
There's tons of hidden side-stuff, and you unlock new "dropzones" through your binoculars... but only if you can get close enough to do so.
Unfortunately, the open world here is an open world that's full of snow, which means that walking around it - as sometimes you have no choice but to do - can be as tedious and slow as, well, walking through knee-deep snow.
Plus, unless you really like snow blindness, or are a big fan of the colour white, it does all get terribly same-y - even with the four different sports (two are virtually identical, and one is a basically a slower version of the other). Anyway.
I love you guys!
SUMMARY: Totally shreddin' the gnar'... TO THE EXTREME!!!
SCORE: 3,122?
UbiSoft have tried hard to keep Steep as varied as possible.
As well as the expected assortment of GoPro-friendly events, there are also gruelling expeditions - where you're required to reach a distant vantage point by whatever means you desire.
Candidly, I never completed one of these expeditions, because there didn't seem to be any way of doing so without climbing up mountains. Which in Steep is no more challenging than pushing up on the joypad stick for about four hours.
There are also weird "story" stages, where you make your way down, while hearing some cod-hippy mythological stuff about the spirit of the mountain, or something. I don't know. I was never really paying attention to what the woman was saying.
The biggest shocker here for me is that the basic snowboarding doesn't feel like it has evolved much since the days of SSX on the PS2, or Nintendo's 1080 Snowboarding. That's not necessarily a complaint: I always had a soft spot for snowboarding games, and this has the same basic feel.
The graphics - while nice enough - aren't exactly breathtaking; beyond the draw distance, resolution, and that, the main difference between this and the snowboarding games of yore is in the amount of content on offer. This is the UbiSoft map-mopping model applied to an extreme sports sim, and it works just fine.
Well... sort of...
There's tons of hidden side-stuff, and you unlock new "dropzones" through your binoculars... but only if you can get close enough to do so.
Unfortunately, the open world here is an open world that's full of snow, which means that walking around it - as sometimes you have no choice but to do - can be as tedious and slow as, well, walking through knee-deep snow.
Plus, unless you really like snow blindness, or are a big fan of the colour white, it does all get terribly same-y - even with the four different sports (two are virtually identical, and one is a basically a slower version of the other). Anyway.
I love you guys!
SUMMARY: Totally shreddin' the gnar'... TO THE EXTREME!!!
SCORE: 3,122?
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