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 no 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 them is and I can report that here, the game still plays and handles as well as you can remember if you have played one before. If you have not played a Trials game before, which given this is the first time on a Nintendo platform, it is likely, the game is simple to pick up. You press down the right trigger to accelerate and the left trigger for breaking and going in reverse, using the left stick, you can lean your bike forwards or backwards, to help land an epic jump. Simple to pick up, but hard to master, because there are many climbs, where if you go full throttle, the bike will simply flip over backwards as all the power and grip is on 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 much 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.