It's Ubi, I ~do~ know what I expected, I just want to be proven wrong sometimes, you know? Won't hide that I've become a bit of an SSX fan in the past month, which has admittedly coloured what I'm looking for in an xtreme snowboarding videogame. Mostly wanted to feel the temperature on what is essentially the latest major snowboarding game released (2016) - which sadly takes the form of an incredibly desolate open world skinner box. A hugeass Forza Horizon-ified slab of Terrain, intricately designed with the care and attention of a bored child arbitrarily raising and dropping the floor height with the Sims topography tool. The polar opposite of SSX's bespoke, densely curated & arcadey racetracks; when you accept a race in Steep you just have to watch a guideline get lazily drawn over a slope, weaving between whatever random hills happen to be in the way. No personality no art direction no design no nothing. So fucking unexciting you'd think the devs suffered from extreme heart risk, so fucking sauceless you'd think it was a Welsh school dinner.

A couple hours into Steep I stumbled upon an unassuming event called "Saloman Challenge", which looked to be another checkpoint run through a forest with a sports equipment manufacture's name slapped on top. What followed was honestly one of the coolest moments of my entire gaming career.

Starting out at the top of a sloping mountain, me and another player (who I was not racing, he just happened to be playing the same mission at the same time as me) slowly made our way through the mountain over the course of 7 minutes as the sun began to set on the Alps. In the background, The Cinematic Orchestra's "To Build a Home" played as both of us weaved between trees and skidded down mountainsides. The combination of a relaxed time limit and the game's wonderful winter aesthetic made this journey feel almost dream-like, amounting to an unhurried stroll through the game's environment.

While the majority of the game consists of high-octane winter sport stunts and nail-biting time limits, at the end of the entire experience and all 115 challenges, this one event still sticks in my mind to this day.

I remember playing SSX3 for the PS2 some years ago and man... That game was a true snowboard game! Nothing like this crap.
There are no pipes or objects where you can make tricks which is really disappointing for this type of game. The best way you can make tricks is with the small hills you find on the snow.
I love snowboard as a sport but this game feels narrow, restricted for absolute no reason.
The graphics are the best part of this game and there are more sports besides snowboard.
I guess you could explore more games that feature snowboard besides this one. It's not my cup of tea but each individual is different.

There are the makings of a fantastic game in here, I truly do mean that. The physics of sledding/skiing/flying/etc. feel great, the world is huge, and the ragdoll physics when you wipe out are really fun. However, I should have known better than to trust it, being a Ubisoft title. It's always online, and impossible to play any objectives/races/etc without being connected, so anything in the game that isn't free roam essentially has an expiration date of whenever Ubisoft pulls the plug on the servers. Aside from that, when I first started playing, my controller was completely unusable. It would work for a second, not work for another second, and the button inputs would randomly change while playing the game. Once I sorted that out (for some reason it requires Steam Input) after an hour or so of playing I started getting ads between gameplay sections telling me to buy the DLC, even though I had bought the "X-Games Gold Edition" that supposedly came with all the DLC. I refunded it after that.

actually played this quite a bit in beta and then some more when it got given away for free as someone who didn't expect this to be the next ssx and didn't pay money for it I did enjoy my time its kinda of a laid back snowboarding (and other snow sports) game the lack fo a proper campaign did make it feel very aimless though you're just doing challenges and they get harder? sometimes but not really idk definitely missing something because some guy at Ubisoft thought this should be a live service game that goes on forever until Ubisoft closes the servers and you cant play it all