After playing Trials Rising’s first few tracks, which send you careening wildly down huge ramps, backflipping through the air and revving enthusiastically on an agile motorbike, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a high-thrills racing game. In fact, it’s as much a puzzle game as a racer, requiring careful, precise control of the throttle, your rider’s weight and your own temper to bunny-hop through tricksy obstacle courses without flipping the bike over or touching an explosive barrel.
It is an adrenaline-heavy experience either way, whether you’re zipping through an easy course or wrestling the bike around a tougher one with your heart in your mouth. It can be intensely frustrating, but even if you never develop total mastery of motocross physics, it’s still great fun.
The courses send you riding across the world from snowy Sweden to picturesque China, providing beautiful backdrops to your two-wheeled antics. These tracks are unpredictable and ever-changing, with explosions or electric fences or, once, an alien invasion livening up the racing.
On PS4, Xbox and PC, Trials Rising looks breathtaking, but on Switch it is unfortunately unimpressive – fog and dust disguise the vistas, and drops in frame rate make precise racing difficult. The vertiginous views are a significant component of Trials’ thrill, so Switch players are missing out.
Off the track, annoying loot boxes, progress screens and a pointless avalanche of uninspiring clothes and bike parts to customise your rider get in the way of smooth progress through the tracks. There are so many confusing currencies – experience, gears, acorns (?) – that I ended up ignoring the lot of them. On the bike, though, Trials Rising is close to flawless, a demanding, absorbing and occasionally rage-inducing game that will serve you up an exciting challenge for as long as you can take it.
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