Trials Rising is a weird entry into the series for me. I've played (semi-religiously) the Trials games since they first hit the Xbox with Trials HD, and dollar per hour ratio it might be one of my favorite and most played franchises of all time (likely just short of TrackMania Stadium on PC).
Rising is better than Fusion, in my opinion, but I also feel pretty strongly that Fusion wasTrials Rising is a weird entry into the series for me. I've played (semi-religiously) the Trials games since they first hit the Xbox with Trials HD, and dollar per hour ratio it might be one of my favorite and most played franchises of all time (likely just short of TrackMania Stadium on PC).
Rising is better than Fusion, in my opinion, but I also feel pretty strongly that Fusion was the worst of the four (HD, Evolution, Fusion, Rising) by a pretty significant margin. The tracks feel more involved, better tested, and better designed than much of what I got out of Fusion, but the outside of them is full of bugs, questionable design choices, and annoyances that I don't think should be forgiven lightly.
For one, the game is a grind. A massive grind. Experienced players will hit Extreme tracks somewhere in the neighborhood of level 70-90, which is hours and hours of play. Why is extra play bad? Because of the way progression works, it's REPLAY not play that levels you. You are forced into repetitive and badly designed "contracts" to gain the XP required to move forward instead of it being based on the number or quality of medals you have like every previous trials game.
These contracts are ridiculous and half of them reward bad play (the literal opposite of what the neat new University of Trials teaches you) by forcing you to do 12+ backflips and 9+ front flips on the same track that you've already completed multiple times. Unlike the actual point of trials, which is finding a better line to get a better time with less faults and compare on the leaderboard, you have to do things poorly to advance. It's just backwards.
There are AI issues that plague the game (a lot of people have complained online about the Stadium Finals matching you with nearly impossible people or bots) that honestly reward you for doing poorly first. The better you do your first time around the more you are hurt on Stadium Finals and Challenger Modes, again, backwards design.
Then there are the loot crates which have no reason to be in this game, are insanely slow and cumbersome to open, and feel like the most Ubisoft decision I've seen in years. They only reward three items per crate, and most of the items you get ARE STICKERS.
Stickers.
The stickers for customization (think Forza series) should have just been unlocked. Instead a ton of them are shoved into a terrible crate system that many players, myself included, will ignore by the 2nd time you've opened them. They are clunky, slow, and promote a reward system that is anti player. There are also custom unlocks tied behind Acorns which can be bought with real money. This in itself is dumb but I get it, if Trials were a F2P game that is. It's not, though, so it goes down as another crap design choice shoehorned into this game.
Lastly, the map gets cluttered and clunky after a few sets of unlocks to the point where progression is all over the place and finding maps you want to do is cumbersome. There are filters, but what was wrong with a LIST of tracks, split by difficulty, that showed your medal and then your time vs. the world and friends? This is the core Trials experience, and that is the part they're messing with for no reason.
A lot of this might be patched out, but after Fusion my hopes are not high. The soul of Trials from the Trials 1/2/HD/Evolution days is dying faster than cool things are being added so I have little to no hope for the next game in the series to right the ship. RedLynx seems to have let Ubi get a little to much hands on in the process and it's killing what was a brilliant an fantastic franchise.
The core racing still has a lot of fun components, you just have to spend too much time peeling back all the garbage to justify it.
6/10 overall, 2/10 for menus/track list/customization, 8/10 for the actual gameplay that seems to take an undercurrent to everything else.… Expand
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