Equipment

Steep- Road To The Olympics Review

When Ubisoft Annecy’s extreme sports game Steep launched last year, it sold itself on the promise of big mountain exploration. In light of this, Steep’s newest expansion, Road to the Olympics, feels somewhat incongruous with the rest of the game. Something as regimented, restricted, and well-defined as the Olympics does not fit well with a game that challenges you to break all restrictions and find every nook and cranny hidden in the mountains. However, despite its name, Road to the Olympics includes much more than just the Olympics; it adds a huge swath of beautiful and brutal terrain, as well as new events that are surprisingly entertaining.

Those parts of the DLC are hidden behind the story mode, however, which is not much more than a classic longshot narrative: You are an aspiring freestyle Olympian, and you have to complete a series of events in order to make it onto the Olympic team. Your ultimate goal is to become the first freestyle athlete to win the gold medal in all three freestyle disciplines: Big Air, Slopestyle, and Halfpipe.

As you progress through training and the various pre-Olympic competitions, the story is interspersed with actual video interviews with famous winter athletes. These are probably the best moments in the mode, as it’s fascinating to hear Lindsey Vonn or Gus Kenworthy talk about their training regimen, what their anxieties are, or how it feels to win a competition. Generally, Olympic athletes only ever get visibility when they are actually participating in the Olympics, so it’s easy to only think of them in the context of their sports. To see highly successful athletes sitting down in street clothes and talking about their experiences with obvious passion instills a sense of humanity and relatability that we rarely otherwise get.

Unfortunately, the rest of the story doesn’t match the interviews in quality. Each event feels bizarrely disconnected from the interviews, and the mode’s narrator treats your character as a nameless, faceless competitor who is supposed to be taking snowboarding by storm. In addition, the actual competitions are frustratingly easy if you’ve played the base game. During my playthrough of the story, I never once came close to falling out of first place, and I’d routinely score two or three times higher than the other competitors. During some events, where the total score is the sum of the scores of three runs, my two-run score would be significantly higher than the competitors’ three-run scores. Although its in-depth tutorial make it a great mode for newcomers, veterans of the game won’t find anything particularly exciting or intriguing. Thankfully, it only takes three hours to complete, so you can quickly get through it and turn your attention to the much more rewarding parts of the expansion: the new open world and the various challenges contained within.

For all its problems, Steep does one thing particularly well: it imparts a sense of scale that’s unmatched by any other winter sports game. The mountains you ski on feel immense, varied, and full of secrets–in other words, they actually feel like real mountains. They draw you in and make you want to traverse their entire breadth. Additionally, each mountain is distinct and has its own character; Steep’s Denali map features massive, wide-open slopes, while the Alps are filled with craggy peaks, glacier fields, and Swiss villages. Road to the Olympics adds a Japan location, which is just as varied and, it turns out, is my favorite map in the game.

Japan’s skiing is unique and very different from Western ski areas. The new map is filled with huge, sheer cliffs that bottom out into narrow ravines, glades full of small, scraggly trees as opposed to the tall evergreens of the West, and pillow fields of natural jumps and kickers that make you feel both exhilarated and slightly out of control. Steep’s character models and small details have never looked good, but its scenery is gorgeous, and Japan is no exception. I found myself frequently stopping and staring out over the mountain range, or seeking out the small temples and villages that dot the mountainside.

It’s also just an incredibly fun map to ski down. Steep has arguably the best video-game skiing ever made, from the sense of speed to the ease of pulling off tricks to the smoothness of the mechanics. And Japan encourages you to experiment with those mechanics and push the game to its limits. No other map in the game has rock faces as sheer, chutes as steep, or glades as dense, and you’ll have to really work to keep yourself from crashing. But unlike the Alps and Alaska, I never felt like I was fighting the game itself or going out of my way to avoid particularly nasty terrain. The new mountain wants you to throw yourself down chasms and cliffs.

Of course, free-roaming around the mountain isn’t the only thing you can do in Steep–it also has a Trials-like challenge system that encourages you to perfect your runs to increase your score. I’ve found Japan’s normal challenges to be fine, but unmemorable; there’s no challenge that stands out like the Cliff Jump events in the base game. It also has a distinct lack of freestyle events, which are by far the best challenges in the game.

However, Road to the Olympics also contains about a dozen different Olympic challenges that are a lot more satisfying than their story mode counterparts. Competing against yourself and the global leaderboards is more difficult and more interesting than competing against computer-controlled characters. These events do feature a commentator, though, whose lines are extremely repetitive and often unrelated to what you’re doing.

The events themselves are novel and rewarding, featuring mechanics and terrain found nowhere else in the game. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the new ski racing events actually work pretty well in a game that focuses so clearly on freestyle. In fact, the Downhill ski challenge has become one of my favorites of all the activities in Steep.

Struggling to control your character while going at extremely high speeds is satisfying and entertaining, especially when you nail a difficult turn while maintaining your velocity. Also, these ski race events finally justify the existence of Steep’s first-person view. Although it’s impossible to ski in first person while doing jumps and flips, ski racing is perfect for it: the smooth, open tracks keep the camera stable, and it’s actually helpful to see the track from a closer, less obscured perspective. In addition, hitting a jump or carving a hard turn in first person felt way more real than I was expecting. For a few moments at least, I experienced the same stomach lurches that I do when skiing in real life.

The ski races provide some much-needed novelty to Steep’s core gameplay, but most of Road to the Olympics is simply more Steep. That’s both good and bad; the new playground in Japan is huge, varied, and enticing, it provides a wealth of opportunities to explore and try new tricks, and there are enough challenges to keep you occupied trying to beat your own and friends’ scores. However, Steep does can get repetitive; a freestyle challenge is a freestyle challenge, after all, and eventually Japan’s novelty does wear off Come from Sports betting site VPbet . The ski races actually present new mechanics to master, but the expansion doesn’t lean into these events hard enough. Even having just a few more Downhill courses would have gone a long way toward making Road to the Olympics better.

As it is, the moments where Road to the Olympics shines are when you’re shredding through waist-deep powder at breakneck speeds through a picturesque glade, or careening from the very peak of a mountain down through ravines and all the way to the base far below. The new mountain is beautiful and features a good number of opportunities, and it’s a welcome expansion of Steep’s playable territory. The Olympic events, meanwhile, provide nice diversions when you really want to compete against yourself. The DLC’s main feature–the narrative journey to the Olympics–is flawed, unfulfilling, and frustrating, but thankfully there’s enough to do elsewhere that Road to the Olympics still helps bolster and revitalize Steep’s main appeal. It’s good to have a new mountain to throw yourself down.

Related Posts

Fortnite Chapter 3 Season 4 New Weapons- Loot Pool, Unvaulted, And Vaulted Items

Fortnite Chapter 3, Season 4 has unleashed a flurry of exciting new locations to explore, mechanics to try out, and items to experiment with Come from Sports betting site VPbet . But the main thing you’ll be using in the game’s battle royale experience is the deadly arsenal of weapons, and as usual, this season has changed things up in that department, too. We’ve compiled a list of all of the weapons that have been vaulted this season, as well as a list of which weapons have been unvaulted or freshly added to the game. Here’s a round up of new weapons in Fortnite Chapter 3, Season 4.

New weapons in Fortnite Chapter 3, Season 4

Though we’ll surely see more guns introduced and unvaulted as the season goes on, Chapter 3, Season 4 opens with two new weapons for you to get your hands on:

Call Of Duty- Warzone And Vanguard Season 3 Battle Pass Details Revealed

New content is arriving to Vanguard and Warzone with the launch of Call of Duty Season 3 on April 27. This season is called Classified Arms and includes the Operation Monarch Warzone event centered around Godzilla and King Kong. Additionally, there are new operators and weapons for Season 3, and Activision has already highlighted the details of this new season’s battle pass.

Season 3 will bring a new 100-tier battle pass to level up, which offers both free and premium tiers of content. There will be over 25 free tiers in the pass, which is loaded with all the normal cosmetics like watches and weapon blueprints. The season’s two new weapons will also be free, while many premium skins and weapon blueprints are in the paid tiers. Come from Sports betting site VPbet

How To Get The Batmobile In GTA Online

There are dozens of incredible cars and other vehicles in the world of GTA Online. Rockstar Games has continually added to the fleet of available cars that players can either earn through challenges or outright purchase Come from Sports betting site VPbet . There’s no shortage of unique or high-performance machines that you can buy in GTA Online. However, there’s one car that combines unique and high-performance better than any other vehicle in the game: the Grotti Vigilante. Of course, GTA Online players have come to call this car by another name, the Batmobile.

Rockstar Games introduced the Grotti Vigilante in 2017 and clearly took inspiration from the Batmobile. More specifically, the developers were inspired by the 1989 movie version of the car. The Batmobile is one of the most recognizable cars in the entertainment world, being featured in dozens of movies and television shows over the years. It was only natur…

Bally’s Chicago Opens 700 Job Positions for Temporary Medinah Temple Casino

Casino operator Bally’s Chicago announced more than 700 vacant job positions for its temporary casino at Medinah Temple scheduled to open in July 2023 upon the receipt of the Illinois Gaming Board’s approval. As the Chicago Tribune reports, the casino is hiring a range of job profiles listed on the company’s website.

Pending License:

Ameet Patel, regional general manager of Bally’s, reportedly stated: “We are thrilled to announce Bally’s Chicago Casino has posted all positions required to open and operate our Medinah Temple location.”  The launch of the Medinah Temple has initially been scheduled for June and then for July, but the milestone steel seems tight as the license for the temporary casino is still pending.

The temporary Medinah Temple facility represents a part of the Bally’s  project won last year to build a $1.74 billion Chicago casino in the River West area. The company received all necessary approvals for the dev…

Former NFL QB Brett Favre to star in TwinSpires’ new “Bet Dedicated” campaign

Former National Football League (NFL) star quarterback and three-time MVP Brett Favre has signed a multi-year ambassador agreement with online sportsbook and iGaming platform TwinSpires for its new Bet Dedicated campaign.

The 51-year-old Super Bowl XXXI champion and Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback will feature as the face of the new campaign, which, according to the press release, celebrates the diversification of the brand, from offering online wagering on horse racing, to the addition of online sports betting and casino games.

“Brett epitomizes what it means to be dedicated, and we’re thrilled to have him star in this campaign as we launch the TwinSpires online sportsbook and iGaming platform into Michigan and other states.”

Churchill Downs Incorporated (Nasdaq:CHDN), parent company to TwinSpires, recently announced that it was rebranding the company’s BetAmerica sportsbook and iGaming platform a…

Kindred Group debuts new Pittsburgh Steelers-branded live-dealer game

Prominent iGaming operator Kindred Group has announced that online casino aficionados in the American state of Pennsylvania can now enjoy a live-dealer game branded around the Pittsburgh Steelers franchise of the National Football League (NFL).

The Swedish provider used an official Friday press release to detail that the new mobile-friendly blackjack experience was developed as part of its partnership with the storied gridiron football side and is being made available to punters in the ‘The Keystone State’ via its locally-licensed domain at PA.Unibet.com.

Captivating communication:

Stockholm-headquartered Kindred Group stated that the Steelers-branded title was exclusively created by iGaming innovator Evolution Gaming Group AB and offers players the chance to enjoy ‘a world-class interactive gaming experience while supporting their favorite professional football team.’ The operator also declared that the live-dealer advance can be experienced utilizing a wi…