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.

Beautiful new mountain to explore; Ski races are surprisingly fun; Interviews with Olympians give an interesting glimpse to athletes' lives

Story mode is frustrating and unrewarding; Commentary is repetitive and sometimes jarring; Non-Olympic challenges are unremarkable

The Winter Olympics and Steep don't have a lot in common other than they take place on snowy mountains, which is the crux of this expansion's problems. Steep's base game and its DLC up to this point are open-ended experiences predicated on letting players explore different extreme sports forms in...

I enjoyed just about every minute I spent playing . Grandiose, attractive environments serving as the backdrop to varied, intense challenges are enough on their own to make this wintry playground somewhere I was always delighted to go back to and spend more time in - a feeling I still have even...

Set in the Alps, just a small distance away from where the studio is based, Steep allows players to freely explore a massive open-world mountain region, full of challenges, races, secrets and, of course, other players.

Steep is open-world as it should be: an unlimited personal playground. Snowboarding is cool. Sailing off a cliff in a wingsuit is cool. Watching a GoPro video of someone triumphantly launching off a ski jump is cool.

Steep brings a lot of really good ideas and reasonably strong snowboarding action to the table, but it's held back by a lot of little problems with the physics, the UI, and the course design. The final result is ambitious and often entertaining, but also unpolished and frustrating.

The extreme sports genre hit it big around the turn of the century with a variety of games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater and SSX. While the latter was a major

No Russian around.

New events are great fun; ‘Become a Legend' mode is nicely put together; A nice change of pace from the base game

Same old bugs; The actual Olympics are underwhelming; Annoying commentary

"A jarring contrast between epic beauty and controller destroying frustration."

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