Milestone delivers its most comprehensive, accessible and
enjoyable racer yet - though it still suffers from some of the same old
problems.
Milestone's a funny little developer, hovering indefinitely
somewhere above or just below adequacy as it churns out game after game.
Ride 3 is its fifth title this year (fifth!) and the latest instalment
in a series that started as recently as 2015. Back then it was a noble
if limited attempt to give bike enthusiasts their own Gran Turismo; a
spirited run through some of the most storied machinery on two wheels
that made a few too many compromises along the way. I liked it a fair
amount back then, though clearly there was still some work to be done
for Milestone to make good on the premise.
In those intervening years - and after a quickfire sequel released
in 2016 - Milestone has put a lot of work in, and Ride 3 is evidence of
that. This is a generously featured racing game, boasting some 230 bikes
and 30 tracks. And what bikes they are - from cafe racers to vintage
rides, and from waspish 2-stroke 250cc with a sting in their tail to the
more bullish modern racers - and what tracks, from the North West 200
to the Nordschleife via Oulton Park and Sugo. There's a lot of game here, and it's often stirring stuff. Ride 3's multiplayer is fairly basic, though it's all lifted by the presence of weekly challenges and leaderboards.
The measure of any racing game, though, isn't to be found in the
sum of tracks, bikes and features, but rather how much you can extract
from any single bike and any single track. Ride 3 acquits itself well
here, and I've lost a good half dozen hours just hotlapping on my own,
pushing a superbike to its limits around the impossible climbs of
Cadwell Park - Lincolnshire's own mini-Nürburgring.
There's an elegance asked of bikes that you don't really get on
four wheels, with braking distances lengthened and racing lines a touch
more malleable - and yet all the while there's a violence that's a key
part of a bike's appeal. Milestone opts to tame that with an
approachable model to its bikes, although they're still able to buck
under acceleration and squirrel under braking. It's all engaging enough -
and easy to get caught in a trance when chasing your own best times -
though I'd have loved the option to truly unleash the fury of these
machines, as too often they can feel like they're wrapped in cotton
wool. In amidst the time trials, point to point events and
straight-up races are these CSR-like drag events. They're not the most
convincing part of the whole package.
It's Forza-esque, essentially (complete with a rewind feature to
scrub back the numerous highsides and lowsides you'll invariably speed
into), and elsewhere Milestone takes more inspiration from Turn 10's
series. The career is a grid of themed series and events, unlocking
slowly over time and imposing some order to your run through Ride 3's
wealth of content. The problem is they unlock a little too slowly, and
while Milestone's taken inspiration from Forza it's the Forza from a
generation ago it's looked to, rather than the one that mixed things up
with a more quickfire selection of events and that more readily added
invitationals. Ride 3, in contrast, is something of a slog.
It does its very best to match the feature set of a marquee racer,
though, with a fully featured and powerful livery editor making the cut,
a deep selection of upgrades and accessories for each bike, plus a slim
photo mode. There's no escaping, though, that the polish you'd expect
of a top-tier racing game - a genre that's more often than not been
about flashy visuals - just isn't there. The bikes themselves look
splendid, modelled with detail and, you sense, a fair amount of lusty
enthusiasm, but the locales look limp, deadened by poor lighting and
lack of detail. There's no dynamic weather, though there are different
weather conditions. Also, at times like this, Ride 3 is far from the
prettiest game - although on PS4 Pro and Xbox One X it does a fair job
of keeping to 60fps.
In that regard, Ride 3 is an extremely raw game - as you
might expect of something that sets out to simulate the hairy-knuckled
thrills of two wheels, but too often to its detriment. There are bizarre
bugs and silly oversights that blight the whole thing - shadows that go
missing in replays, or a race over sign that flashes across your screen
about 20 seconds before you've even had the chance to cross the finish
line, or overzealous track limits that can make hotlapping unnecessarily
frustrating, or the overeager requirements of a time challenge that's
simply impossible unless you trick out your bike to the max.
And yet, for all that, I've greatly enjoyed Ride 3, its rough edges
overcome by the passion that Milestone so evidently has for its subject
matter, and if you've any passion for the art of motorbikes it's a joy
to share that with the developer. And where else exactly are you going
to be able to take Mike Hailwood's four-cylinder 500cc Honda around
Brands Hatch's Grand Prix loop? Milestone's been threatening to make the
great motorbike game for some time now, and while Ride 3 isn't quite
it, it's as close as it's ever been.
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