It is with great pleasure, a brimming heart and the jittery edge of someone whose adrenaline has been depleted over the course of several late night sessions that I can report this: Trials is back.
Trials Rising reviewDeveloper: RedLynx/Ubisoft KievPublisher: UbisoftPlatform: Reviewed on Xbox One XAvailability: Out February 26th on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch
Maybe you hadn’t noticed it’s been away. There have been two entries this generation, after all, but both of them lacked that spark the all-important spark that made RedLynx’s series so beloved; Fusion’s aesthetic proved anaemic and felt more of a regression than meaningful progress, and let’s just pretend the risible Trials of the Blood Dragon never happened.
Trials Rising finds that flame and then some; this is a rekindling of the series that lavishes the formula with love, attention and production values the like of which the series hasn’t seen before (and also introduces a thin veneer of bullshit that’s thankfully fairly easy to ignore – but we can get to that later). Most importantly, it doubles down on what makes Trials special.
What is that, exactly? It depends on where you’re coming from, but Trials Rising has pretty much every base covered. There’s the exacting challenge, those beautifully analogue bikes that feel like bits of buzzing putty in your hands. There’s that delicious sense of pure control as you balance your rider’s weight alongside the throttle and brake. That hasn’t been dulled – indeed, going back to older Trials games as a point of comparison, it seems there’s more fidelity here than there was before. There are those challenges themselves, levels that slowly move from exercises in pure flow to punishing gauntlets that demand seemingly impossible feats – and Trials Rising has an abundance of both across it’s more than 100 offerings.