This is genre of game that has really taken off, I remember playing this style of game in 2008 which was very simple and had just become 3D, The Trials franchise has become such a hit, and they have released a few really great games so far, but does this match up to their standards?
This game has evolved from many trials and error (pun intended). RedLynx had a large bag of goodies to dig from. This genre was a hit or miss, some other games such as trials fusion were good, but eventually came stale, because at the end of the day is was the same thing over and over and over. Then they decided to introduce user created content, thus changing the game up a bit, but now there is this game, a complete mix of the old and new, added with some fresh flavour to spice things up. This game isn’t about riding a dirt bike up and over obstacles just to try and complete the stage, Redlynx has managed to bring in a whole story line as well as new concepts to finish the levels such as an electric bike, a remote control car and some other futuristic tanks like cars, and the best part is at some points in the stage you can get off your bike and run and gun! The reason for the running and gunning is that this is a cross over between Far cry: Blood Dragon and trials, giving us the opportunity to run and gun. You also get to control the blood dragon but the game takes away a lot of the fun from what it could be.
The story of the game is based around rescuing the Blood Dragons, to stop the enemy (Rex Power Colt the cyber commando) from harvesting the blood dragons blood to create a weapon of mass destruction, while riding through the different terrains and running into the buildings and making sure the foot soldiers numbers decrease, When you get down into the depths of the of the enemy base your whole objective is to create as much destruction in many ways or forms like blowing up barrels and shooting these big pink blobs that hold pieces of the base together, using pistols and machine guns and grappling hooks.
There are some really annoying aspects to this game, such as every time you start a level you get a speech that is about as long as the level and extremely irritating after hearing it 20 times, and yes the whole point of the game isn’t to die over and over but sometimes people aren’t so good and they fail before they succeed. The Sergeant became so annoying that I eventually muted him because It got to a point where I could say his speech before he could, This game is also supposed to be an 80s themed futuristic game, however they have got a few things mixed up, for example when you play the screen jumps around and when you are trying to concentrate it becomes frustrating, The noises are also lacking, they have been poorly done with the tech available today. The music is also shocking, its more noise than music.
The graphics are mediocre; they almost feel as if they are out of an adult swim cartoon that has been turned into a game. The “menus” are the worst, the levels are pictures on the wall of different creatures and they are in a random order making it soo annoying when you want to redo a level after finishing the game, you have to jump around to every single picture until you find the level you want to play. The levels for example on one picture go 12, 13, 14 , 25, 26 ,27, making you jump between them all. The levels are short, they range from 5 minutes to 13 minutes, in that short space to play all the levels the points collected help level up your chosen animal that represents you growing from inexperienced to grown up, it’s impossible to get to level up to what you need it to be, it takes forever.
This is a good game but they need to sort out what theme they want to follow and fix the glitches and smoothen out the gameplay and definitely change the sound tracks and do something about that annoying sergeant’s speech, but hey what more can you expect from Ubisoft. I give this game a solid 4/10 because of the lack of effort.