There are a decent amount of tracks, but the presence of a “season pass” button that promises six content packs full of tracks and customisable parts advises us that there’s plenty more to come. You may love the tricks, (I didn’t) but that’s mostly because it feels as though the new trick courses (FMX-ones) take the place of more tracks, as opposed to being in addition to them. Often, one of the challenges for a track will involve a specific trick at a specific location, while others may require ten flips while retaining a gold medal. Due to the sheer amount of perpetual motion involved, and the physics of your rider, it takes a while to get used to sticking a landing, as a sudden violent swing of the bike’s trajectory will happen as your rider swings back onto his bike. As your bike changes angle, so does the required direction needed to perform said tricks. Put simply: when in the air, depending on which angle your bike is at, you can use the right stick to perform one of many tricks. The tricks are a nice idea, but they are tricky to perform. You can also do that via uPlay, if you fancy the squirrel head – and who wouldn’t? Each level goes towards an overall numerical value, and as you go through them, you’ll unlock bike upgrades or costumes. They reward you with XP, and your profile will continuously level up (at a rapid pace, to be honest with you) over three categories: single player, multiplayer, and track central. While the three challenges per track offer a reason for the more hardcore players to spend more time on the easy tracks, they will frustrate the mid-level racers, because some are so obtuse, or just plain awkward, that they will only really offer end-game content – something to do when you’ve exhausted all other options. In tandem with the new challenge mode, you can now perform tricks on your bike, which is a slightly less successful addition. Just as before, you’ll have to earn an increasing amount of medals to unlock the higher difficulties, only this time around, RedLynx have added challenges in an effort to make the easier tracks worth revisiting – rather successfully so. The real gold is (and probably always will) getting past the forced tutorials, accelerating through the easy tracks and unlocking the ball-bustingly hard tracks that truly challenge you.
Only, diminishing returns means that someone who has played the last few entries in the series will race through a large portion of the tracks, getting gold medals and topping their leaderboard of friends, earning kudos and rivalries in the process. But in that time, Ubisoft have acquired RedLynx and, well, it seems they’ve pretty much let them get on with what they do best (aside from adding super long credit sequences at the end of games) and make Trials games at their own pace, with the same highly skilled track designers that make the series what it is: rewarding and highly challenging. It doesn’t feel like two years ago (nearly to the day) that Trials Evolution came out.