One of the biggest surprises from Ubisoft’s E3 press conference was the announcement of Steep, an open-world snow sports game that crosses snowboarding, skiing and wingsuit-ing, allowing you to make your own paths and descents across several mountains. We were able to try out the game for ourselves on the floor, and go hands-on with a genre that’s seen little action since the days of SSX.

In our demo, we got to try out the wingsuit, skis and snowboard. The first thing that struck us was that the mountain courses look absolutely amazing. Snow moves realistically as you plow through on the snowboard, and it covers the rocks and trees around you just as you would expect it to in real life.

The wingsuit course we tried was a proximity course, a dangerous but fun concoction which required staying as close to the ground and other obstacles as possible to generate a high score. The wingsuit itself had a great sense of speed, and making sure to stay close to obstacles while narrowly avoiding them really got our adrenaline pumping, especially after some close calls.

The ski and snowboard components of the demo covered races and trick events. The races are pretty self explanatory, as you fly down the mountain at breakneck speed while dodging rocks and clumps of trees. Like the wingsuit, there really was an incredible sense of speed. Taking risks by heading towards clumps of trees as you explore to find the shortest distance to the finish line creates some tense moments, and an interesting balancing act between that risk and reward.

Trick mechanics were easy to quickly grasp. You can jump off any ramp, natural or man-made, to gain air. Then, once you’re airborne, you can flick a stick to start spinning and use a trigger to hold on with one of your hands. It’s simple to understand and to begin pulling off beginner’s tricks, but it did feel like mastery of this would take some time.

While the demo was short, overall, the game felt promising, and in our opinion could be well on the way to becoming the best winter sports game in some time. Steep is on track to be released sometime in December 2016.