I don’t have strong feelings about this game, but it was a chill time. Pretty cool. Ice. Temperatures below 273.15 K.

I have enjoyed snowboard games like Snowboard Kids DS, and Zelda: Twilight Princess, and extreme sports can make for good games. I remember Steep being heralded as a showcase of next-gen technology, albeit two years into the PS4′s life. It’s very impressive to have such a massive open world that you can zoom around so quickly, and the game looks quite nice.

Being in a perpetually snowbound landscape could get visually monotonous, but they do things like altering the lighting and time of day, and it does help checkpoint markers to stand out. The setting is the Alps, centred around Mont Blanc, and although I’m not sure how accurate it is to the real thing, it’s a stunning landscape densely packed with opportunities to do sick runs and tricks on your choice of conveyance.

Snowboarding is the main event, with skiing as an alternative. You can also do exciting glides on a wingsuit, or gain height with the fiddly paraglider or intense rocket wings. Walking is very slow but I guess that’s the point, and it’s easy to warp to events or points of interest. The DLC adds sleds and possibly more, as well as a ton of extra events; I didn’t invest in any of the large assortment on offer, as I’d had my fill from the base game.

I found it nice to get into the zone of boarding around. The events are varied, with races, trick score chases, daredevil stunts, etc. and even repeating tricky challenges was fun (to a point; I left maybe 10% of the hardest ones as they got too demanding for me). As you go you’re always discovering new hotspots and locations, and certain events are a bit more open-ended, about exploring or following another rider around. These were my favourite, and often were about emphasising the natural beauty of the place or the pure pursuit of personal thrills.

There’s another side to the game that I found obnoxious though. Steep leans  into real-world extreme sports culture, with heavy product placement of Red Bull between sponsored events, cosmetics, and even your character drinking it before certain runs. NPC characters who speak to you in VO are often laddish bros or yuppie types. The clothing menus are full of sleek, name-brand outfits and gear. The game also annoyingly pushes its DLC really hard on the player, which only pushed me away.

There’s a choice of a few characters to play as (there’s fewer women than men, I noticed…), mostly differentiated by their voice lines as you’re usually buried under cold-weather layers. I chose RInko Kitano as her scruffy, grungy default outfit seemed to cut against the clean, corporate apparel that dominates the selection. Winning events drip feeds you new cosmetics but very few fit her aesthetic, sadly.

Even after clearing the base game to my satisfaction, the somewhat finicky controls remained a slight sticking point. Ground-based turning and mid-air spinning being bound to the same motion often tripped me up—literally—causing bailouts, and I never did get the hang of operating the map without resetting my position, which caused problems with orienteering events.

The other odd thing about playing Steep at this point in time is that it was at one stage a “living game” with timed events and rewards and such. The tabs remain in the menu but the service is no longer updating, which is a little sad. And the very first thing the game tells you on launch is that there’s a new Ubisoft extreme sports game you should check out instead. Good grief! Talk about a noxious first impression. Anyway, as a big winter sports playground, Steep is a nice time; there’s just some rocky patches along the way.