Honorable Mention: Steep
It’s award season here at Twinfinite! Starting with a few runner ups, let’s look back at the best Ubisoft games from this year and our 2016 winner!
We haven’t seen a truly great winter sports game in quite some time. While the 2012 reboot of SSX released to a pretty warm reception, nothing has stood as competition, until now. Steep gives players complete freedom to explore and experience a large chunk of the Alps mountain range in whatever way they see fit. Be it by snowboarding, skiing, wingsuit, or paragliding, you can do all of them, whenever and wherever you want to.
Steep is more than just an open-world snow sports game, though. It wants players to link up and tackle trails together, set high scores for one another, and use the extensive range of camera options to capture your perfect run and give it the production value it deserves. Of course, there are your traditional events to complete too, such as races, high score competitions, and time trials to complete too, if you want a little more structure to your shredding escapades.
While Steep does many great things, it could have learned a lesson from SSX. The trick controls are limited, fiddly, and oftentimes unresponsive. This makes nailing a run far more frustrating and less frequent than it should be, and for reasons beyond your control. After a while, you’ll tame the control scheme and things will, for the most part, fall in place. It’s just a shame it’s inconsistent.
