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Riders Republic review: a free roaming extreme sports theme parkPut some mustard on it, cool cats
Put some mustard on it, cool cats
Insufferable cutscenes aside, this is a thrilling downhill racing simulator in which you, a new arrival to a vast landscape of snowy peaks, scorched desert badlands, towering forests and rain-lashed mud flats, must repeatedly hurl yourself down the side of a mountain faster or more stylishly than your opponents. The world is a compressed version of California with all of the San Franciscos taken out, leaving just a bizarre population of baggy jeans wearing Urban Dictionary acolytes, and a vast interconnected series of freely roamable tracks and wilderness littered with activities to complete and landmarks to discover.
Riders Republic Gameplay and Impressions | Fun And Annoying, But Mostly FunWatch on YouTube
Riders Republic Gameplay and Impressions | Fun And Annoying, But Mostly Fun
The arcade controls are sensible enough to transfer from one mode of transport to another without your brain having to reconfigure itself, but critically, the physics of sliding down an icy slope feels distinct from biking around a sharp bend. Your various means of getting around aren’t just stylistic choices: tyres feel nice and sticky on slick mud, and just on the edge of control on loose gravel and when blasting through forest paths at high speed. Snowboards carve through powder with satisfying heft and take off on packed, wet snow.
Whatever you’ve got strapped to your feet or between your thighs, Riders Republic feels exhilarating at all times, nailing the sense of breakneck speed as you thread your way through densely packed tree trunks and hurtle down wide pistes. In first-person mode, things feel legitimately perilous, as though the handlebars of your bike could come through the screen at any moment and smash out all of your front teeth.
Things get a little more fiddly when it comes to trick controls. There are gameplay assists to help you land perfectly every time, but you can also remove the training wheels entirely to unlock a trick mode that involves grappling with both thumbsticks to perform a full suite of grabs and rotations. It’s not a very technical trick system in either mode, and performing impressive stunts isn’t at the core of the game. You could happily progress through Riders Republic while refusing to do a single backflip (which is testament to how ceaselessly rewarding the game is), but could feel unchallenging to nimble-fingered fans of classic mid-noughties snowboarding games.
During events you race or compete for trick points against the ghosts of other players, whose times and scores are seemingly chosen based on the difficulty setting you selected before jumping into the event. Here, the game’s eagerness to dish out rewards starts to feel too transparent and forgiving. If you’re struggling to place, just drop down a challenge level or two to play against incrementally worse and worse versions of the scoreboard until you’re finishing on the podium. Or, as you’re more likely to do, go play one of the hundred or so other events littering the map.
The lack of challenge gates means you can freely tumble around the world having fun and jetpacking into stuff, but you never feel tested. Riders Republic sincerely doesn’t want you to give up on it, and does everything it can to ensure you never feel frustrated or snagged on a particularly tricky event, even if that means sanding down the difficulty.
There is a Sixth Sense vibe about Riders Republic’s approach to multiplayer. Everywhere around you, at all times, are hundreds of other players snowboarding and wingsuiting overhead, or zipping past you on jet-powered skis with perfect dramatic timing. Open the map and it’s swarming with other people, their countless icons streaming down mountainsides like dropped marbles. Most of these are based on ghost data, AI characters dressed up as human players to liven up the environment, but they succeed in making the world feel incredibly busy and fun, like you’re always in the middle of a fifty square kilometre rave in which you cannot speak to or interact meaningfully with anyone else.
It’s reliably brilliant fun, and the best multiplayer experience a Ubisoft studio has ever worked into one their many open worlds. Whether played alone or alongside 63 other warm bodies, Riders Republic is unalloyed gratification in a stunning natural utopia, a streamlined series of rewarding activities so open-ended and forgiving it can sometimes veer into a directionless fuzz. Things are certain to change shape as more stuff is added and the player-base settles in for the long games-as-a-service haul, but there’s enough arcade fun here at launch to delight your inner extreme sportsperson, the one who looks at Tony Hawk at 53 and thinks, yes, there is still time for me.
