6/23/2023 0 Comments Rider republicAs one of those awful people that squeezes themselves into lycra and holds up country traffic most weekend mornings, the newly added bikes of Riders Republic hold a special appeal, and they don't disappoint there's a surprising amount of road and mountain bikes on offer, many of them officially licensed from the likes of Specialized and Kona. There's fine detail here too that helps sell each discipline, such as the beautifully crunchy snow that tangibly deforms when on snowboard or skis, the whistle of the wind when in a wingsuit or that gorgeous soft whir of a well-oiled chainset that accompanies a bike ride. It's far from disastrous, mind, and something you quickly adjust to, though it's worth knowing this is an extreme sports game with a certain lightness to its feel.Īll that's more than compensated for by what Riders Republic does well, and by its sheer maximalist exuberance. There are three control configurations on offer - a trickster one that maps stunt moves to the right stick, a racer one that affords you camera control and a third one that softly mimics Steep's own scheme - and neither of them works flawlessly, with a lack of heft gently undermining all of the sports on offer here. It's fiddly, too, as is the core of Riders Republic. It's dumb and outrageously fun, the act of sportswitching via the radial menu as much a part of the process as performing tricks for the more adventurous player. Soar down a mountainside in a wingsuit and you can maintain some of that momentum as you morph in a glitchy instant to two wheels - or perhaps send your mountain bike off a cliff edge and out into the blue yonder before firing up the rocket wingsuit and shooting out across the horizon. Partly that's down to how you can fast travel to any event on the map and be taken there near instantaneously (on Series X, at least, where I spent most of my time playing Riders Republic), and part of it's down to how you can switch between disciplines on the fly. There's a decent amount of community tools in Riders Republic, and where that community takes this game next is going to be fascinating. Persevere, though, and it's then often remarkable how eager Riders Republic is to get out of the way. Given how pervasive that voiceover can be in the first hour, I wouldn't be surprised if it proved an endurance test too far for most players. This is one of those extreme sports games that overlays its action with grating voice overs, the dialogue more likely to give you a nosebleed than any of the highest altitudes you're invited to scale. It's annoying, too, especially at first when the overlong tutorial takes hold and refuses to let go for the best part of an hour. It is deeply, gloriously silly, though, a playground told with an exuberance that's infectious as you pedal down perilous courses in matching giraffe outfits. This is neither as focussed - there's a broadening out of disciplines to include bikes as well as terrain types that go beyond mere snow here - nor quite so strange, with no spoken word interjections from the mountains themselves (at least none that I've come across in over a dozen hours or so of play - this is a vast, vast game after all). Some of that brilliance might be familiar from Steep, 2016's equally open-ended extreme sports outing upon which so much of Riders Republic is built.
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