It is with great pleasure, a brimming heart and the jittery edge of
someone whose adrenaline has been depleted over the course of several
late night sessions that I can report this: Trials is back.
Maybe
you hadn't noticed it's been away. There have been two entries this
generation, after all, but both of them lacked that spark the
all-important spark that made RedLynx's series so beloved; Fusion's
aesthetic proved anaemic and felt more of a regression than meaningful
progress, and let's just pretend the risible Trials of the Blood Dragon
never happened.
Trials Rising finds that flame and then some;
this is a rekindling of the series that lavishes the formula with love,
attention and production values the like of which the series hasn't seen
before (and also introduces a thin veneer of bullshit that's thankfully
fairly easy to ignore - but we can get to that later). Most
importantly, it doubles down on what makes Trials special.
I've
had only limited experience with the Switch version - this was reviewed
mostly on Xbox One X - and on Nintendo's console the frame-rate is
halved, with a noticeable lack of detail (and of course the lack of
analogue triggers). I wouldn't recommend that format personally, but I
know people who've poured more time than me into it and are more than
okay with the limitations.What is that,
exactly? It depends on where you're coming from, but Trials Rising has
pretty much every base covered. There's the exacting challenge, those
beautifully analogue bikes that feel like bits of buzzing putty in your
hands. There's that delicious sense of pure control as you balance your
rider's weight alongside the throttle and brake. That hasn't been dulled
- indeed, going back to older Trials games as a point of comparison, it
seems there's more fidelity here than there was before. There are those
challenges themselves, levels that slowly move from exercises in pure
flow to punishing gauntlets that demand seemingly impossible feats - and
Trials Rising has an abundance of both across it's more than 100
offerings.
For me, what makes Trials sing is that it's one of the
few genuinely funny video games out there, and Trials Rising is the
funniest yet. I'm not talking the fresher's week humour of Blood dragon -
all unicorn rides and 'do you remember the 80s' nonsense - but
something deeper, more profound and harder to nail. Trials, at its best,
is about the peerless art of slapstick; it's Buster Keaton's bike ride in Sherlock Jr. brought to life, all perfectly timed pratfalls and improbable feats with you placed as the starring stuntman.
That's more explicit than ever in Trials Rising, whether that's in
the all-new tandem which brings a little Laurel and Hardy into the mix
or in the levels which bring a new layer intricacy to the design. There
are sprints through Hollywood film sets - complete with a beautiful
reference to the falling house prank in Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr.
- runs through snowy peaks that have you balancing your bike on
colossal snowballs, a jaunt through the crumbling ruins of Pripyat that
has you riding through buildings as they fall in on themselves. They're
set-pieces that have been brought to life with verve and imagination,
and it's quite staggering how many there are on offer, and how rich they
feel.
This is Trials reimagined as a big budget game, which at
times can make it all feel far removed from the series' more humble
beginnings - a trait which rubs both ways. On the one hand this is the
richest, most fully-featured Trials yet. There's a fully-fledged
tutorial that slowly locks over the course of your adventures, schooling
you in the darker arts and deeper nuances of high-level Trials play,
while Contracts offer the perfect excuse to return to older levels,
layering on new challenges that net big rewards upon completion. A world
map ties every level together, and thematically there's a coherence
that's never been there in Trials before.
This
is a fully-featured Trials game, complete with a track editor that this
time out boasts some 8000 objects, as well as Track Central where you
can upload your creations and play with other people's. As ever, there's
a brilliant local multiplayer game to be found in this too. But
if that coherence provides a nice throughline for Trials' many levels,
you've got to wonder how welcome some of the other new baggage is. Did
Trials really need an XP system, loot boxes and multiple currencies that
also introduce the grim spectre of microtransactions? That's a
rhetorical question, of course, because in each instance the answer is a
resounding no. It's a layer of nonsense that Trials could really do
without, so perhaps it's for the best that it's almost entirely
redundant; loot boxes are limited to a pool of cosmetics so slim they're
best ignored, while the levelling does introduces only a small amount
of grinding to progress at certain points. That does mean returning to
levels to complete Contracts, though so well-crafted are they all that
it never really feels like a chore.
And that's the thing about
Rising; you can push all that to one side and enjoy one of the purest
Trials games there's been in some time, where it's all about nothing
more than guiding your bike from one end of a devilishly designed level
to the other. Rinse, repeat, then get absolutely rinsed as the
difficulty level spikes just as it always has. Trials Rising can be a
bit all over the place, and in trying to impart some structure and
modern traits over it all it can come off a bit awkward - a bit like
seeing a scruffy old friend suited and booted in an ill-fitting three
piece. What's important, though, is that that old friend is back, and
has learnt a few neat tricks along the way. What a delight it is to have
a great Trials game with us again.
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