Riders Republic review – lumpy and loveable extreme sports playground
Like a lot of Ubisoft games, Riders Republic is a lot. The work of some seven studios led by Ubisoft Annecy, this is a vast open world compendium of extreme sports that can be as lumpy as the terrain you ride rough over, packed with so much stuff you can see and feel it straining at the seams. It is also, perhaps more crucially, an extreme sports game that will fall over itself in order to serve up some fun, and one that ensures that, for all its excess, you’re never more than a few seconds away from the primal thrill of throwing yourself down the side of a mountain. Riders Republic is, more often than not, a brilliant thing.
Riders Republic review
- Developer: Ubisoft
- Publisher: Ubisoft
- Platform: Played on Xbox Series X
- Availability: Out now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S
Some of that brilliance might be familiar from Steep, 2016’s equally open-ended extreme sports outing upon which so much of Riders Republic is built. This is neither as focussed – there’s a broadening out of disciplines to include bikes as well as terrain types that go beyond mere snow here – nor quite so strange, with no spoken word interjections from the mountains themselves (at least none that I’ve come across in over a dozen hours or so of play – this is a vast, vast game after all). It is deeply, gloriously silly, though, a playground told with an exuberance that’s infectious as you pedal down perilous courses in matching giraffe outfits.
It’s annoying, too, especially at first when the overlong tutorial takes hold and refuses to let go for the best part of an hour. This is one of those extreme sports games that overlays its action with grating voice overs, the dialogue more likely to give you a nosebleed than any of the highest altitudes you’re invited to scale. Given how pervasive that voiceover can be in the first hour, I wouldn’t be surprised if it proved an endurance test too far for most players. Persevere, though, and it’s then often remarkable how eager Riders Republic is to get out of the way.
Partly that’s down to how you can fast travel to any event on the map and be taken there near instantaneously (on Series X, at least, where I spent most of my time playing Riders Republic), and part of it’s down to how you can switch between disciplines on the fly. Soar down a mountainside in a wingsuit and you can maintain some of that momentum as you morph in a glitchy instant to two wheels – or perhaps send your mountain bike off a cliff edge and out into the blue yonder before firing up the rocket wingsuit and shooting out across the horizon. It’s dumb and outrageously fun, the act of sportswitching via the radial menu as much a part of the process as performing tricks for the more adventurous player.
