RIDE
Made by - Milestone Games
The simulation game is becoming a hot commodity again, what with the "Marmite" game that is Project C.A.R.S. becoming a hit within a weekend, Forza 6 more than likely getting footage at E3 and Assetto Corsa being announced for next year. So Milestone decide to get in on the act by providing for two wheeled aficionados with Ride. Does it cover the bases for those who prefer to ride the engine though?
From the off you can see they are trying to keep it leaned towards the more realistic areas, rather than shove it down the throat of arcade racers. The track selection is pretty decent, with nearly 15 of them on show. It consists of a mixture of made up tracks and some well known places, including Donnington Park and Imola. Even the bikes are well catered for, with some of the most well known names in the industry. From Kawasaki and Yamaha to British stalwart Triumph are included, with bikes to cover every horsepower area too.
The game is laid out in your stereotypical way that a sim racer would be. You make up your rider first and then you get to choose your first ride. After your tutorial you can go into the World Tour section, which gives you all of your tournaments and the criteria they have within. You can jump straight to any area though if you have earned enough cash to do so, but it is once you make it to the starting grid that things start to go wrong, and in some cases unforgivably so.
Before I do go on though, I have to stress that the console you're paying this on is over 10 years old. The game looks dated before you even get off the line, apart from the bikes, to be fair. It is literally like they spent the whole time making them look good and decided to make everything else bland, which is not the trade off I would have liked. I want to at least have some nice scenery going past at high speed instead of something looking like a wonky LEGO brick.
The most unforgivable part of Ride though is the unbelievable moments of slow down, which occur mainly at the corners, but the fact is that they should not be happening in the slightest. Most racing games, especially in a simulator world aim for 60 frames a second and when you consider what Forza 3 and 4 managed to do on the same architecture you have to say that this kind of drop is really unacceptable. Take my first race for example. All seemed fair and well until I got to the first corner and then it just felt like the whole game was going to go into cardiac arrest. The frame rate must have dropped to 15 at least, it became choppy and made the bike scary to control. This is also after an update, by the way, so they've had time to sort it too, and haven't
The result is a game that loses its appeal rather quickly. It isn't the hardest game to control and doesn't exactly FEEL like it's a sim, but even if it was the most simple game to use in history you would still not want to go back to it. It just doesn't have that ability to make you come back for some more racing and this is a very big problem. Going round a track repeatedly is not exactly the most exciting thing to do outside of a multi-million earning job (with good insurance) so to kill any fun out of it within a few corners is a cardinal sin.
The online side works ok, but when the main part of the game is just bland and in some cases broken, do you really want to sit through this for any substantial period of time? I know I sure as hell didn't.
It is such a shame though because the last major sim motorbike game of any note was back in the days of the PS2 with Tourist Trophy and it has been a long time since a game tried to encompass all of the major bike makers into one area outside of the Moto GP. This feels a bit incomplete when you compare it to the almost super-sims that have started to surface, but at the end of the day it simply fails to deliver on what it tries to promise on the box.
The bottom line is that it is a game with its heart in the right place, but everything else just doesn't quite fit. The physics don't feel professional, as the pro and standard controls almost feel identical. The graphics outside of the bikes could have been done on older machines and the graphical juddering that seems to happen in busy areas just should not happen. This could have been so much better and it feels even worse when you consider this is from an Italian company that specialise in sims. They did the last two WRC titles and are working on a Sebastian Loeb Rally game as well. They should have plenty of knowledge to make this right, but it just doesn't do it.
I was actually looking forward to seeing a different side to the simulation game, with two wheels removed I would have expected something more challenging, fun and fiddly all at the same time. I got none of that. Instead I got something which doesn't quite know WHAT it wants to be, and because of that it has no real identity, no soul and can't really deliver on the premise that it sets out to start with. Biking fans will just have to wait a little longer for something which utilises their sport's strong points a bit better. Four wheel petrol heads at this moment in time have never had it so good. Those with half the rubber however are going through a dry patch that even slicks would cry about.
Not so much leaving it on the track...... Leave it on the shelf.
UNINSPIRING
As always, thank you to the Xbox Community for giving us the chance to review the game.