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| Riders Republic - Before You Buy |
today, we're talking about "Riders Republic," a game that straight up wasn't really on our radar too much, but we saw the early-access event earlier in the week, and now we got our hands on the game, and it's a lot of fun. It's a little messy, but it's a blast if you like these types of games.
I haven't been a big fan of many Ubisoft games for a while. "Far Cry 6" started to kind of break that mold when I did that "Before You Buy," and this one here scratches that extreme sports itch, it seems, way more than I was expecting. Oh, and so you know, this gameplay footage here was captured on the PS5 version, but it's also available on all the other platforms except for Nintendo Switch.
Now, "Riders Republic" is an always-online, big, crazy, extreme sports open-world racing game with some games-as-a-service elements. Once you unlock stuff, you're free to do basically anything on an absolutely massive open-world map that serves as kind of an amalgamation of national parks and stuff.You can ride downhill on mountain bikes, blaze through the snow on skis or on a snowboard, fly down mountains on a wingsuit, or race through checkpoints with a jet pack, kind of like "Rocketeer"-style, or a couple of other wacky things.
Now, in a lot of ways, it feels like Ubisoft took what they learned from "Steep," a game that had a lot of fans, but I wasn't really into it, and "The Crew," a game that also had its fans, but I thought it was just okay. Here, they took what they learned from "Steep" and "The Crew," too, and they took this stuff, and they mashed it up into a big, crazy, fun game. Now, there's progression, if you're playing alone, so you can work your way through a career. You're winning races and completing sub-objectives within those races to earn stars to unlock things in your career and also level up a ranking.
By progressing, you're unlocking more race types and more challenges and stuff, and of course, you're getting more gear along the way. The important gear is all the actual stuff you're using: snowboards and bikes and stuff. And you're working your way up to stuff with better stats, like, say, a mountain bike with more grip on the road. You can also just explore the map and find special points, collectibles, races, and secrets. You can use your gear or fun stuff like a snowmobile or a fan parachute or other weird things to get around. You can also just walk around on foot. And all of these things, you can swap in real time with kind of like an equipment wheel. There really is a lot of freedom. Now, you're also earning cash and stuff to buy yourself cool outfits to express yourself: silly masks, hats, clothing, pants.
Some of it can get pretty ridiculous and funny, as you probably see here. I mostly keep it simple just 'cause I like the racing and I don't want to get too distracted, but hey, that's just me, I'm boring. The game does give you the now-typical storefront, where you can buy in-game currency with real-world money as well if you want. It's all cosmetic. The only stat increases are through the gear you get, like your bikes and your snowboards and stuff, and you can't buy that stuff, but it's there and it's worth pointing out.
The game also has daily different clothing items you can buy, and it seems like there's gonna be a ton of content and races and seasons. It's just trickling out all the time. That's the games-as-a-service, live-service-type stuff. This seems like a game where they just want you to keep playing. There's all these other types of little things to grind for, too. You can add sponsorships that give you daily challenges to earn more stuff. It's kind of endless. The game piles a lot on you, but once you're racing and just having fun, you forget about all of it. But there is a lot of stuff to progress through if you want it. But at the little town center where you get new clothing and all that stuff, there's also a ton of other fun things to engage in, like direct matchmaking for specific types of races. There's downhill jams, trick attack-style stuff, high score stuff, time attack.
You name it, it seems like the game has it. And it also lets you create your own races and share stuff. There's definitely a decent social element here. The world and races are always populated with players all over the place doing fun stuff, and cross-play is enabled by default. You can group up and do some head-to-head-style challenge stuff, and there's seemingly a lot of good, friendly competition. The whole thing reminds me of the more recent "Forza Horizon" games, you know, the party atmosphere with everyone racing and the game trying to throw as much fun stuff at you as possible at all times.
Now, along with this party atmosphere comes the presentation. There's a bunch of hey-wow-cool-dude types of people telling you about races and introducing you to things, and it fades away after a while when you're just focused on racing and grinding, but that stuff, this whole presentation is corny, and it just kind of bounces right off of me, man.
Nobody really acts like this and it's just awkward, so I wish they didn't bother. Again, that's really just personal-opinion stuff. I found myself wanting to skip a lot of the cutscenes and stuff. It's a racing game. But all that stuff, all the progression, the endlessly playing, the career, whatever, the actual gameplay here, the core gameplay, the racing is what left me really impressed, aside from a few things here and there. I'm sorry I saved this for last, but the gameplay is the best part of the game and worth the price of admission. "Riders Republic" is ambitious. It takes on a lot of different styles of racing, but they all feel pretty darn good. There's some floaty physics here and there, but it's mostly for just a tiny bit of forgiveness to mistakes.
The different styles are executed through the developers seemingly keeping each one fairly simple enough to not screw up, but also just complicated enough to be perfectly fun, if that makes sense. All of the different styles here are fun to play and easy to pick up, but a bit more difficult to master. There are two main control modes, and there are, more importantly, two main trick control modes. There is a kind of auto-assist trick mode where you can spin and do tricks, but they will auto-rotate to land out perfectly at the end.
Think of doing a spin in the air in "Tony Hawk," where the game lines up the straight-line landing for you. You can use that or you can get higher scores and turn off the assists and make sure you land the angle of your tricks and spins perfectly manually. It takes some practice to nail really perfect landings. I'm pretty bad, but I still have fun.
Now, grinding on skis and snowboards is a bit floaty, but being able to hop off and combo out of them is really nice. I appreciate stuff like that. Wingsuiting has some interesting momentum to it, and the jetpack stuff is just straight-up dumb fun. But the bicycle stuff is my absolute favorite. It's the best. It's got the best feel to it, and drifting and sliding around corners and hitting jumps and hairpin turns and trying to sprint up a hill with that limited sprint meter, all of it feels really, really satisfying. For the bike races, and really all of the races, the sense of speed is really impressive.
The game does a really good job of demonstrating that you're going really fast, and it all feels dangerous and satisfying, and it can be pretty challenging with the higher-level races, too. This is what kept me playing, the raw funness of it. All the other stuff, I didn't care about as much. I just like the racing. I also really appreciate that there's a first-person view you can swap to on the fly. It's very nicely done, and it's my preferred way to race. It doesn't feel like a half-assed afterthought.
Now, with that, it's not all perfect. I mentioned the game can be a little messy. It can be messy, thanks to some technical glitches. I've gotten stuck in the environment, I've seen a few visual glitches, and while the game is overall gorgeous at certain spots with the different times of day and little things like your skis cutting through the snow sometimes, or you riding and clipping through other bikers, here and there, it can look a little unfinished or a little awkward.
Some races, too, are just messy. Some of the funnier, goof vehicles like the rocket-powered bikes or the rocket-powered skis are often in races where the checkpoints are just poorly placed and barely seem to account for the types of vehicle you're using. It's awkward and killed the fun a little bit. There's also just a few stinker race types, like the delivery missions.
Along with that, there are races where you transition from a bike to skis or a snowboard or a wingsuit, all in one race, and the transitions just feel sloppy, and they can kind of set you up for failure in stupid ways. That might be me nitpicking, but it's also worth pointing out that the game just doesn't feel like it ever quite figured out how to handle if you screw up. With all races, you're able to do a "Forza"-style rewind if you want, but the racers continue if you're rewinding time, so that's your penalty. Now, it makes sense, but it just feels weird. And sometimes, when you screw up or slightly go off course and miss, or you just get stuck in a barrier, sometimes it doesn't feel good.
This, of course, comes with the territory here. It's extreme sports, and the thrill is that it's narrow victory or high-speed breakneck moments, but the game's flow can be awkwardly interrupted a bit by how it handles failure. And that might just be my petty personal opinion. Really, I just want to emphasize how much fun I think this game is. The whole like, "Hey, what's up, gamers?" thing can kind of be ignored, and the amount of freedom and types of modes you get is truly awesome.
Playing with friends is cool. Engaging in the mass races is cool, where it's you and a ton of other players in a match, obnoxiously hurtling down a mountain, almost "Fall Guys"-style, together at high speeds. I keep using the words fun factor in this video, and I might sound kind of like a broken record by now, but I think it's really important.
If you liked "Steep," you might be happy with this game, but if you just like "SSX: or "Matt Hoffman's BMX" or "Tony Hawk" or "Dave Miura" or "X Games" or "2Xtreme" or "Razor Scooter," whatever game you played, whatever extreme sports games you used to play, if you like that type of stuff, at the very least, consider keeping "Riders Republic" on your radar. I'm really curious to see if the community takes to it. There's already some hints on social media that some people are digging it. I've seen some clips where people pull off some really impressive stunts.
But it's a good starting platform here, and I can't wait to see where it goes. But of course, that's a "Before You Buy." You know how this works by now. I give you some pros, some cons, what the game is, and some personal opinion, and now I want to hear yours down in the comments.