Trials Rising
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
More than ever before, each track in Trials Rising is a spectacle to be savoured. It’s like a Busby Berkeley production where the dancing girls and their ostrich feathers have been substituted for swinging girders and falling planks. Like riding a motocross bike through The Truman Show’s tightly choreographed facsimile of reality, or along an OK Go music video. To view them simply as vehicular obstacle courses isn’t doing Red Lynx’s artistry justice. They’re a collection of Hollywood set-pieces you happen to be passing through at precisely the right time.
This is a return to form for the series, then, after a few years in the wilderness during which Trials Fusion and Trials Of The Blood Dragon happened to no one’s particular delight or, really, attention. Perhaps it seemed as though the idea of guiding a QWOP- alike motorcyclist along 2.5D courses had been played out, its every conceivable creative vein already mined by previous iterations. The series has been going for over two decades now, if you count the Java game countless school children played in furtively secreted browser windows during their IT lessons. Longtime Trials players have such extensive muscle memory skills by now that every possible sequence of obstacles can be, and has been, traversed. What mountains are left to climb? As it transpires: plenty of them.
It says a lot for the tracks in Trials Rising that it barely matters that the handling feels identical to that of Fusion and its older ancestors. The physics simulation is still tethered in the realm of the slapstick, and bike wheels still have a way of lodging themselves through solid objects. Once in every hundred runs, those momentary lapses seem like unforgivable failings to deliver to you the platinum medal you did your bit to attain; the other 99 per cent of the time the sheer slapstick comedy of it all prevails.
Not that this isn’t still an endeavour with a nighinfinite skill ceiling. The deft touches that make the difference between landing perfectly in the groove of a ramp or bouncing awkwardly off it take a long time to reveal themselves and sink into your thumbs. Feathering the brake and throttle in mid-air; knowing precisely how many back or front flips to attempt in order to carry the right amount of momentum – these things still take time, and thousands of restarts.
It also says a lot that the game’s able to pull off a presentation style that squarely summons 2005: skate punk in its soundtrack, and a world-tour conceit where events pop up on an atlas in linear fashion. Polish off one batch, and the next few will pop into being in a new region, this time that bit trickier.
Before you become too confused as to whether you’ve slipped back through the fabric of time and ended up in a Tony Hawk game, though, thoroughly modern trappings make themselves known. By far the
most welcome is a quasi-multiplayer touch which introduces ghost riders to each race. Not just bronze, silver and gold medal times, but riders with mistakes and eccentricities in their runs, their data pulled from other players and sent into your game as an invading force to be quashed by your superior performances. It’s a strange sensation, securing the gold medal time but still losing out to kevin_420 for overall speed. CPUgenerated riders do fill the gaps, particularly in eightstrong race events, but nonetheless provide enough to bring out one’s worst competitive tendencies. True, live multiplayer occurs either cooperatively via the ingenious tandem bike which introduces dual controls, or in traditional multiplayer race modes. There’s more to be done once all the solo events are ticked off, then, but the latter do really feel like the main attraction.
Loot boxes round off Trials Rising’s modern touches, offering cosmetic customisation options every bit as enticing as the magazine selection in a dentist’s waiting room. Within 50 loot boxes, the vast majority of items seem to be stickers, watering down the bike and rider items to an infuriating degree. The system simply didn’t need to live within Trials Rising – although it can be ignored to no great penalty.
But for those ubiquitous cosmetic gubbins, the only bones to be picked with Red Lynx’s inspired Trials comeback are technical ones. On PS4, frame drops in menus and at the end of each course are frequent, and that trademark texture buffering when an Unreal Engine game first loads an environment seems to take longer in Trials Rising than is usual, with some ground and trackside detail textures failing to upscale for quite a while. These are, of course, eminently fixable blemishes, and ones which may not appear across all platforms.
Back to that world tour. Many games have leaned on that structural conceit, but few use it as effectively as this. The geographical flavour of each event has real meaning, and cultural characteristics are often interwoven with such artistry that it almost seems a shame to just ride through them. You’re taken from the explosion-laden sets of Hollywood movie studios to the famous tomato fight on the streets of Buñol, as if these were all perfectly reasonable venues for a trials course, and then before you have time to digest how much thought it must have taken for all those moving parts to sync up with your progression along that 2.5D plane, you’re somewhere else in the world.
Virtual sightseeing usually happens in firstperson, with a gun bobbing around at the bottom of the screen and a map full of objectives. It’s the big open worlds that take the plaudits for building a sense of place, and for drawing the player into an atmosphere. Never has a physics-based vehicular puzzle game bestowed such a vivid sense so generously before.
A quasimultiplayer touch introduces ghost riders, their data pulled from other players and sent into your game