Trials Rising
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Explore over-the-top action and physics-bending motorcycle racing in Trials Rising, the latest edition of the Trials franchise. All new features, more competitions, and more tracks mean new challenges! Ride challenging tracks around the world – from the Great Wall of China and New York City to the Eiffel Tower and everywhere in between. With the new hilarious Tandem Bike mode, partner with a friend and try to control one bike with two riders. From your local backyard to worldwide stadiums, defeat all your opponents online and rise to glory. Create unique levels in Track Central using hundreds of different components. The possibilities are endless – and so is the fun!
Steam User 38
Trials Rising provides more of that “easy to learn, hard to master” 2.5D racing platforming fun the franchise is known for – but unnecessary lootboxes, bad monetization practices and content locked behind a loathsome grind seriously diminish the overall experience
When I reviewed Trials Fusion, the predecessor to Trials Rising, I called it a “fun 2.5D racing-platformer with a lot of great and diverse stages offering a nice flow" while noting the bad FMX system, the game limiting the number of vehicles during most stages and an unven difficulty curve.
So when I played Trials Rising, I was quite delighted to see that some of my criticisms actually got addressed! Trials Rising still offers the same gameplay with more great and unique stages, as expected, but the barely working FMX system got removed and all vehicles you unlock can be used for every stage now. Rather unfortunately, however, some new design decisions immediately diminish the overall experience once more.
Let’s start with the good news first: Trials Rising plays great and offers exactly what the franchise is known for: “easy to learn, hard to master” 2.5D racing platforming fun. There are some truly creative stages and backdrops in this game – driving across a rollercoaster in what’s obviously supposed to be Disneyland Paris or jumping off the Great Wall in China are great moments to experience. I do miss some of the weirder stages that the sci-fi setting of Trials Fusion offered, but this more “realistic” around-the-world tour offers a large variety of tracks to play through as well.
Similar to Trials Fusion, all stages from easy to medium difficulty shouldn’t provide too much trouble, even if you’re going for gold. As soon as you reach the “hard” difficulty however, difficulty once again ramps up by a lot, as advanced driving techniques are once again required if you even just want to finish a stage. The (optional) tutorial experience has been heavily expanded upon in order to prepare players for this difficulty spike, but it’s once again creating a point in the game where you have to decide if you want to invest a lot of time in order to master the gameplay techniques to continue – or simply stop playing. There are quite a lot of easy to medium stages to play through until you reach this point though, as well as the option to create/download more tracks, so you’re still getting quite a lot of content even if you don’t want to bother with the harder stages.
Compared to Trials Fusion, Trials Rising also focusses a lot more on the competition with other players worldwide – even in the single-player career mode. By default, the game forces you to compete with the ghost data of other players during all stages, which can significantly increase loading times if the game is unable to find fitting data (happens occasionally). Thankfully, an update added in the option to simply disable the ghosts.
However, with no option to disable them and another result of the push for more player competition came a lootbox system, which is frankly unnecessary. Lootboxes offer cosmetic items for your driver/bikes as well as victory/defeat/loading screen poses. Especially annoying are the victory poses (usually equipped by the "ghosts"), playing loud music at the end of a match and interrupting the game’s (excellent) soundtrack as a result. Unsurprisingly, lootboxes can be obtained through a premium currency (“Acorns”) buyable with real money – or by levelling up.
Which brings us to another big problem of Trials Rising – the grind. In Trials Fusion, new stages could be unlocked trough medals obtained by completing stages – the better you completed a stage (under a certain time & with a certain number of attempts), the more medals you get. Completing most of the stages from easy to hard difficulty on “gold” level, which isn’t too hard, is enough to unlock all tracks from the base game. Trials Rising changes this progression system: New stages can now be unlocked by finishing certain “arena” stages – which in turn are only unlocked by reaching a certain player level. Players can get experience points for levelling up by completing stages (the better, the more XP), contracts (finish a stage under certain requirements, e.g. under a time limit & while doing ten front flips) or tutorial lessons.
This alone would not pose a problem as long as you can progress smoothly, easily levelling up by methods of your choosing. As is usually the case with these level systems however, in order to keep player engagement numbers up, you’re sooner or later going to run into a needlessly long grind.
In my case, this happened when I was about to unlock the “hard” stages of the base game. Even though I completed every stage with a “gold” rating up until that point, including the optional stages from the two paid-for expansions (!), I suddenly ran out of new stages to tackle – but still had a lot of levelling to do if I wanted to unlock new stages. At this point, all you can is do repeat old stages for contracts or go for the highest ratings of each stage, if you don’t want to compete in online multiplayer. Thanks to an extremely bad worldmap UI though, it can be quite challenging to pick out tracks you have yet to clear with higher ratings, even with filters active.
What makes matters worse is that there are more stages in the game that can be unlocked at this point – only for real money. As I mentioned, there are two expansions which offer more stages. But even if you buy these, you’re still missing out on a few tracks locked behind the purchase of so-called “Micro Packs”, which are only (!) purchasable with Acorns, the premium currency buyable with real money. You can earn enough Acorn for all the micro packs through gameplay as this guide shows, but – unsurprisingly - that’s going to take a lot (!) of time.
Trials Rising really feels like a game that fell victim to the publisher saying “I want this monetized as much as possible”. Ubisoft wants to sell lootboxes, so the game makes sure you’re going to see these cosmetics as much as possible (e.g. victory screens). Ubisofts wants to sell DLC & „micro“ DLC while keeping player engagement up, so you’ll encounter a grind where you have to replay old stages in order to unlock new ones – or buy additional tracks instead. Even some bikes are locked behind the „Acorns“ premium currency and can’t be bought with the “free” in-game currency instead!
This is especially sad because the gameplay core of Trials Rising is so good and it’s a shame to see it locked behind these bad monetization choices. That said, if you’re only going for the easy to medium tracks, you won’t really be bothered by anything besides the lootboxes – it’s only once you delve into the game further that you’re going to notice the limitations. So if you’re looking at Trials Rising for some quick rounds of good old Trials gameplay, you’re going to be fine. Want to spend more time with the later tracks of the game though, you’ll need to brave yourself for some tracks you’re probably going to run for XP instead of the fun factor.
Concluding, Trials Rising is a good Trials experience that’s diminished by some bad monetization choices. It’s fun, fast, offers a more detailed newcomer experience and provides some great and unique tracks to show off your skills in. Unfortunately, it’d have been so much better if all content was easily unlockable instead of being hidden behind artifical walls that only serve to slow down player progress – or require the player to spend even more real money.
Steam User 27
The game is fun. The soundtrack is good. Ubisoft Connect is neither
Steam User 17
very addicting and satisfying 2d platformer
one problem though. ubisoft connect
Steam User 9
It's Trials so I love it, even with its horrible Ubisoft launcher and awful UI!
Steam User 5
UBISOFT IS GARBAGE. Uplay is GARBAGE. The microtransactions are GARBAGE.
However, the game itself is amazing. It's your call if you want to deal with Ubi's shenanigans.
Steam User 3
Developer good, publisher bad
Steam User 2
Great game with some (IMO small) missteps...
+ The gameplay is excellent (meaning it hasn't changed at all...)!
+ The levels are truly creative and varied. It's downright impressive at times.
+ Lots of content and it is simply a lot of fun to play whether you are a casual or pro...
- The map system becomes an ugly cluster**** towards the end. It doesn't help you to choose what to play at all. I would prefer just a simple track list. =o
- The less i say about Ubisoft Connect the happier I'll be...
- Pointless cosmetics and lootcrates - never really understood the appeal of these, especially in a game like this. Whatever devtime is used in doing this nonsense takes away from something else that could be improved...
- Some of the sponsor challenges are tedious and not fun to try. They can be infuriatingly punishing (drive on one wheel f.ex.), and they actually can drive you away from the game even though they are optional. =D
- Although the idea is good, the ghost driver loading times are just awful. I recommed turning them off...