Best feature after ~5 minutes of Steep:
100mph wingsuit faceplant into the goal still counts as successfully completing the tutorial run

Also Mutemath is rad

Professional Wingsuitist

The video stops there because the game crashed

Steep beta is... a lot less fun than I'd hoped it would be

Controls are SUPER heavy and sluggish

It's got that Extremely Ubisoft feeling of all your inputs being just sort of a vague suggestion that the game's free to ignore if it wants

It's sort of forgivable in something like Far Cry but to do that in a game that's ostensibly ABOUT movement and speed is... disappointing

This happened though so that's pretty nice

I wasn't recording but one guy tried to move and suddenly exploded out of it in a flurry of wonderfully distorted ragdoll polygons

Put some more time into Steep. One interesting system: You have a health bar which represent how much impact force you can absorb

Hitting the ground after a jump is effectively "damage", so there's actually a difference between landing a slope vs on flat ground

Has some neat implications for planning your movement; bigger jumps are survivable IF you still have enough health to withstand them

I feel like Steep's biggest sin is that it's *inconsistent*

It very heavily prioritizes iffy physics vagaries over player intent

Like the single least-reliable input in the game is JUMPING

You'd think that would've been a priority in a game about jumping off of things

You can only jump when you're touching the ground but the ground is rough and unpredictable and you're constantly getting bounced slightly

Pretty sure just adding a few milliseconds of coyote time would have made a night/day difference

This is compounded by the wildly inconsistent camera which keeps getting stuck with the player model hiding everything in front of you

Like pretty often I'll be retrying a run multiple times and the success of the run depends on whether the camera hides the jumps or not

I feel like the biggest indictment is the fact that it's nearly impossible to retry a run and consistently hit the same jumps/landings

It's not deep/difficult controls, it's a *inadequate* controls that are constantly overpowered by unpredictable forces

It's fighting a losing battle against a highly opinionated and largely capricious physics/animation engine

The tech for which is, admittedly, super impressive

But it's not deployed in service of making the game fun to play