For all that Ubisoft has largely come to be viewed as the epitome of paint-by-numbers,
quantity-over-quality design over the years, it’s easy to forget that, for a while there,
their development teams were seemingly more than willing to get self-referential.
Remember when Assassin’s Creed Black Flag had you commodifying the lives of real historical
people for entertainment under the employ of a shady video game company with darker
ulterior motives that also happened to be called…
Abstergo Montreal?
Likewise, 2014’s Trials Fusion managed to frame its stunt-based gameplay in an unexpected
light, with the subtle introduction of a tongue-in-cheek metanarrative alluding to the fact that the
countless, instant respawns that have become something of a series trademark, actually
see you inhabiting (and subsequently murdering) a new clone every time.
The titular trials here are actually part of a larger experiment carried out by a yet
another shadowy organisation; seeing you burn through lives for the sake of sheer content.
Most players probably didn’t notice but it served as a clever use of mechanics by
the developers to poke just a little bit of fun at the nature of the industry they found
themselves in.
Fast forward to the present state of Ubisoft and its tentpole franchises, however, and
the subtext has all but vanished.
The years of research carried out to find our breaking point have paid off; we unironically
grind and toil against hostile design until we can do so no more, at which point we pay
our corporate overlords directly in order to play less of the Assassin’s Creed game
so we can move onto Far Cry and do exactly the same thing.
In a similar vein, we can’t just have a good Trials game anymore and despite the recently
released Rising at points representing the peak of the series, it inevitably comes with
the baggage of a modern Ubisoft title—spreading its content unnecessarily thin via a shift
towards a confusing, grindy progression system and a much greater focus on social play that
seems like it exists purely to drive the game’s newly foregrounded customisation and loot
economy.
At its core, you still have the same beautifully simple control setup of accelerate, break
and tilt that over time reveals its surprising depth.
You come up against obstacles that serve to morph your expectations of a cartoonish, explosive
motorcycle game from pedal-to-the-metal bombast to something more measured.
You come to view ramps less as opportunities for sick jumps and more as an obstacle to
be efficiently overcome, as you try to spend as little time in the air as possible in order
to keep moving forward.
So far so Trials, but like Fusion before it, the devil is in the details of the way these
mechanics are framed; namely, that the series’ edges appear to be shaved away in order to
facilitate a decidedly more “social experience” this time around.
Gone is the sleek, futuristic look of Fusion or even just the straight-ahead, no frills
approach of Evolution—here the action you came for is broken up by saccharine cardboard
cut-outs showering you with praise and Fame and Trials Coins and loot crates containing
cosmetic items of varying rarity.
Every race has a podium finish consisting of real players.
The game’s campaign features a disappointingly high number of the stadium-style courses previously
relegated to multiplayer modes, sacrificing the imaginative design of more solitary tracks
for the feeling that you’re sharing a social space with physical characters wearing physical
items.
Load screens give you just enough time to look at the cuh-razy clothes others might
be wearing and maybe make you wonder how you might acquire them yourself.
The friendly corporate face belying a darker underbelly isn’t played for laughs here—it
just is what it is.
On first glance, Trials now looks and operates uncomfortably like a mobile game, and the
way its new progression system is structured - gating off its best content until you’ve
jumped through enough arbitrary hoops - doesn’t do the game any favours.
The core premise of the game’s campaign seems simple enough—rise to the top of the
league, become the champion.
Disappointingly mundane compared to the borderline Soylent Green homage of its predecessor but
also maybe a return to the basics of Evolution; mirroring the purity of its gameplay.
That is until you get literally past that intro and find that Rising has something of
a readability problem.
See, in order to get to the top of the league you need to compete in several smaller leagues
first which comprise of three races each and you unlock them based on your level which
is affected by the events strewn all over this map screen, themselves broken up by sponsors
which seem to have no purpose but to offer different types of events as well as contracts
which see you repeating older events but this time with different objectives thrown into
the mix.
It all leads to a confusing scenario in which you’re not quite sure what events you have
or haven’t done, which ones are new events and which merely new contracts, or whether
you’re chasing medals, seconds or Fame, whatever Fame does.
Repeating tracks is part of the charm of a Trials game as you aim to claw viciously away
at that time.
In previous titles it was in service of your own improvement—better time, better medal.
It was simple.
Here, you could have mastered a course long ago, got a diamond medal on a fairly unexciting
track, but you’ll need to go back to it again to do three backflips because completing
the arbitrary contract will net you more experience than trying to perfect your times on tougher
events, experience being crucial to unlocking new areas.
It becomes grating fast and I’ll admit I was waiting, just waiting for that pop up
to tell me that time savers were available, but to my shock, that pop up never came.
And in a world where we are literally paying Ubisoft to play less of their games, there’s
something oddly comforting about seeing in-game purchases limited to purely cosmetic options.
The issue I have with this, however, is not about the randomness of paid loot boxes—these
random crates can seemingly only be purchased with currency earned through play.
It’s not even that customisation is a thing—you’ve always been able to buy goofy stuff for your
rider to wear, as an aside.
The issue is that, as someone who doesn’t really get the Pavlovian response to cosmetic
loot crates, unlocking daft gear was never a cause for celebration.
Instead, I found myself cursing the rigamarole of having to watch every single crate open
separately, with all the different systems contributing to this economy getting directly
in the way of the action I came here for.
Which is a damn shame because that action isn’t merely “more Trials”, it’s arguably
some of the best Trials.
After completing a couple of pretty underwhelming leagues, you’re thrust into some of the
most vibrant course design the series has ever seen; with the one benefit of lacking
any kind of strong, unifying visual aesthetic being that, when it comes to the tracks themselves,
the designers aren’t limited by geography or time period—allowing them to go totally
buckwild.
The pacing seen in many of these globetrotting tracks straddle that line between sheer spectacle
and delicacy to a near perfect degree.
The best maps can be broken into discrete pockets, with a brief window here or there
allowing for holding down the pedal with reckless abandon before quickly moving to a moment
of split-second decision making; where letting off the gas at the exact right instant, the
slightest tilt of the stick can be the difference between success and failure.
It’s a loop with each tiny moment feeding into the next, giving you the sensation of
riding a rollercoaster that you retain a terrifying amount of control over.
And while you can look at the game’s mobile-esque presentation or some of its more basic course
design earlier on and argue that the game has dumbed itself down from its more hardcore
roots, the surgical precision required by some of Rising’s later tracks bring this
into question—the game perhaps just doesn’t make the best of first impressions.
What’s more, not all of Rising’s nods towards roping in new players with a friendly
face seem so cynically minded.
For example, what little training missions existed in previous games failed to fully
verse newbies in the often incredibly subtle techniques needed to complete harder stages,
while also acting as an unnecessary, unskippable roadblock for more seasoned players.
Rising’s University of Trials mode, by presenting these lessons as a series of optional, graded
tasks, provides an incredibly comprehensive set of stages for newcomers to learn, while
presenting bolder players a heightened skill ceiling later on, allowing them to treat these
tutorials as if they were normal stages and therefore giving them a reason to fully explore
the mode (however patronising it may outwardly appear).
It even goes to the trouble of explaining the mistakes new players tend to make; like
constantly accelerating or trying to jump as high as possible, for example.
While the game has its issues structurally, modes like this make it clear that, rather
than luring in the suckers with a happy-go-lucky aesthetic and watching them bang their heads
against the wall in frustration, the developers above all else want you to understand and
enjoy the unique and often unforgiving type of challenge that Trials can offer; they know
their players and they care.
And this is perhaps the most frustrating thing about Rising—in terms of moment-to-moment
gameplay, this is almost certainly the most satisfied a Trials game has left me and you
can tell that a great amount of care was afforded to iterating on the strengths of the series’
course design and game feel.
It’s just unfortunately wrapped up in a quagmire of needless and confusing additions
blocking you from Rising’s best features, in order that it can shove its worst in your
face.
It all goes to show that, even if you have the best controlling game on the planet, the
way you frame that experience, from aesthetic to systems to maybe even a narrative level,
still matters a great deal.
So I hope you enjoyed this piece on Trials Rising.
If you did and want to support the show directly, you can always head to my Patreon like these
wonderful folks currently on screen.
Your unbelievably generous support has been fundamental in allowing me to keep doing the
work I do and I’ll never be able to fully thank you for that.
Special thanks go to Mark B. Writing, Rob, Nico Bleackley, Michael Wolf, Artjom Vitsjuk,
Ali Almuhanna, Sivaas, Dallas Kean, Spencer (iruleatgames) Gellar, William Fielder, Timothy
Jones, Spike Jones, TheNamlessGuy, Chris Wright, Ham Migas, Travis Bennett, Zach Casserly,
Samuel Pickens, Tom Nash, Shardfire, Ana Pimentel, Jessie Rine, Brandon Robinson, Justins Holderness,
Christian Konemann, Mathieu Nachury, Nicolas Ross and Charlie Yang.
And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I will see you next time.