Steep Beta Impressions
I played the Steep closed beta a few weeks ago as well as a little bit of the open beta this passed weekend and it wasn’t really my thing. I do the think the game has it’s share of problems but as a whole, Steep seems like it can be fun and… chill.
Steep is an extreme winter sports game with skiing, snowboard, wing-suiting, and paragliding? Is that what it is? Events in game are divided between each sport and being fast or skillful or a good combination of both. The focus of the game is really on passive, leaderboard style competition between you, your friends, and the world I guess if you don’t have friends. On top of competing in the set events, you can take a pass down the mountain and then on the fly, generate a challenge for others to compete in. This combines the extreme sports competition in the game and exploring the mountain to not only find things around the map but also make your own challenges.
This is still the beta so the problems that I have could not be there in the full game so take these with a grain of salt. My main problem with the beta is that it lacks overall structure. Steep directs you through the first handful of events but then just lets you loose from there. Beyond that set of events, you’ll have to just find the rest yourself. I get that the idea is to explore but it seems like the core drop zones and events should be the basis for the experience and you can build off of that with your own custom events. I also don’t like the act of discovering the dropzones. In order to discover them, you have to stop and look at the dropzones through binoculars. I’d prefer if you just passively discovered them while going around so when you finish one route, you can just go back up and start a new route instead of having to go, then stop, pull out the biniculars, look at the new point, then continue then stop again if you see another one. I can appreciate that traveling around the mountain is fun but any time I have to stop just to look at some spot on the mountain, as infrequent as it might be, it’s annoying.
The other problem I have with the game is that instead of just being a fun, relaxing game, everytime you manage to crash or get yourself in a dangerous position, your person yells for help or some other very not cool thing. Steep is the same game that was really offputting at E3 after their trailer feature someone shouting “NO” then making a very violent sound when crashing during a wingsuiting event. It’s uncool every time i hear it. I get that extreme sports are dangerous but this is a video game and I’m going to push it in an unrealistic way that will definitely put my person in danger. I don’t need my character to say anything about it.
While Steep doesn’t necessarily seem great for me, I think there is still a lot to like for other people out there. It can still be very relaxing to just snowboard down the mountain and the game overall gets more enjoyable if you play and compete with friends. From a technical side, the PS4 version of the beta didn’t run at 60 fps if that’s a killer for you. I only really noticed because I played the beta on the PC aswell which ran pretty well on my PC despite streaming the game. For me, and anyone that makes youtube videos or streams, on option in the menus just lets you turn off copyrighted music which is a really nice quality of life thing to have in the game. If developers take anything from this game, take that. That’s a rad feature.
The Steep beta is over at the point but if you like a combination of winter extreme sports and time trial style competition, Steep could be a fun game for you. Check it out or whatever. Hopefully there’s a demo or something maybe.
