Tour De France is rapidly becoming a bigger sport every year. This year there were record numbers of fans and to top it off the weather was beautiful, resulting in some very picturesque scenery. I've never really watched the Tour De France until seeing clips of this years race incidents on the news, so I didn't really know what to expect when playing this game. Before reading on, I must warn you, in this game there are no fans getting in the way taking selfies.
As a person who doesn't know the ins and outs of the Tour De France, I was glad when I looked at rules of the race and they were concise but still clear. I felt after a few minutes of reading that I knew enough to play the game, safe in the knowledge that I now know a bit a bout what's going on in the race.
There are 4 game modes, Warm up, Tour De France, Pro-Team and Versus. I feel the creators were conscious of the fact that a lot of people don't know exactly what's going on in the Tour De France and they get it spot on with the set-up of the game. The warm up mode along with the easy to understand rules section was perfect for me. The Warm up mode takes you on a quick ride demonstrating the different controls and points out that your are not in the race alone, you are in a team race.
The Tour De France mode is pretty self explanatory, as is the versus mode. The Tour De France is the actual race set over 21 separate stages. The versus mode is split screen,Unfortunately you can't play online but you can either race against each other or race together in co-op mode.
The Pro-Team mode is probably my favourite. This is like a regular career mode. You start with a fictional team and need to perform well in races to attract the attention of better riders. You also need to achieve objectives to add funds to your budget, if you don't have a big enough budget you can't pay for the interested riders.
Game play in this game was quite good to start with, the scenery looks great but after a few races you start to feel like it is the same scenery flying past on repeat with a bit of pavement added here or there, and an extra cow or parked car thrown in. Each race in the Tour De France mode lasts about 45 minutes to an hour depending on how flat or mountainous the course is. I felt this was quite a long time for a race and it did start to feel a bit laborious after a while. You tend to spend about 80% of the race trying to conserve energy by going as slow as possible and trying to stay behind someone to shelter from the wind. This makes the game more of a turtle race than the usual all-out, fast paced, racing action I am used to. Although if you are a fan of the Tour De France and you like the strategy and planning aspect of games then you will enjoy this game.
One thing that seemed a bit odd to me was the name editor which is one of the main menus on the title screen. Why would the name editor be standing out so much? I soon found out when I was racing as “B Waggons”. Turns out there are some licensing issues so not all of the names are correct. This doesn't really make much of a difference to the game and you can change the name yourself if it bothering you.
Overall I found the game play to be quite laborious. You spend too much time trying to go as slow as possible which is not entertaining to me. Although I must admit it is quite exciting when there's a breakaway and you are near the front of the peloton. The graphics are ok yet they do seem to repeat like a low budget cartoon, the graphics don't affect the game-play so it's not too much of an issue. I think there's a small market for this game, the fans of Tour De France will like this and will enjoy the strategy side of it, but it's too slow and not thrilling enough for me. I thought for a long time about the rating I would give for this game. Personally I would rate the game 2 out of 5, but that would be quite unfair because I believe a Tour De France fanatic would rate it 4, therefore I’m being fair and rating it 3 out of 5. Huge thanks to Xbox for the game.
