E3 2018: Hands on with Trials Rising

I can’t quite state a specific reason that I fell in love with the Trials games, be it the quick restarts after an epic fail or perhaps the precision required in later levels, in order to finish, I just don’t know, but now a new trials game is on the way and I am excited.

Jumping onto the game had me be presented with a map of the world, with multiple locations being highlighted, London, New York and more, these locations all had an icon over them, which indicated an event, but the icons were different and changed based on how hard the level was, something that will make selecting a course a bit easier. There was not single focus to the level difficulty either, some locations had a few easy and medium courses, others had an easy and a hard, so one specific country, won’t challenge you more than the others.

Of course, course difficulty is not really important, racing upon the course is way more so and I can report here that the game still plays and handled as well as you may remember. However, if this is your first time experiencing a Trials game before, firstly shame on you, but secondly, you need to know it is simple to pick up, but quite difficult to master. Pulling the right trigger will give you the gas to go forwards, the left trigger is your break and reverse option and then you use the left stick to adjust the lean of your bike, ensuring you are able to land after a suitably epic jump. But you can’t just go full throttle and be done with it, on a climb, if the bike has too much power, you will end up flipping over as the only wheel to grip is the rear wheel.

With multiple bikes to choose from for each stage, the demo gave me a lot of options to play with and while sometimes it would recommend a specific bike, more so for the harder courses, I usually just went with the all-rounder. The trick to any Trials game is learning just how many acceleration you need to give at any particular time, because sometimes, large gaps are best cleared by going a little slower and if you have selected a super powerful bike, it makes that jump just a little more challenging. The game does appear to be offering more, in terms of characters you will be seeing, at least in menus, I mean not counting the Blood Dragon game, the last Trials game had you listening to a voice over a speaker and that was it.

The games multiplayer was sadly something I could not play, but the game did still have the ghosts that the series has had forever, these ghosts show your best time and your friends, so it gives you an incentive to replay courses, in order to get the best time. One thing I did notice, which was something that Fusion suffered from, was that the graphics appeared to be a lot smoother, even in this early build. Past games would always take a moment to load in elements, like textures and objects, when you reset to a checkpoint, but this build did not suffer from that at all, if that translates to the full release, it would be very much appreciated.

I know I was having too much fun playing it, when a rep from Ubisoft came up and asked me if I would not mind stopping to play, as others were waiting, silly me agreed to do so, rather than just playing more. Being honest up front, I am not sure why the game is called Trials Rising, nothing that I played at E3 gave me any sort of indication, but I honestly could also not care, the game was still fun as heck and the wait until 2019 is going to be a long one.