Trials Evolution

How many hours did you spend on Trials HD, inventing new curse words for every mis-timed tilt, overly enthusiastic throttle and exploding barrel?

Trials Evolution is back to claim your sanity with a squirrely smile. The format is pretty much the same in that you control a kamikaze rider, leaning him back and forth, accelerating and braking to get him over some crazy ramps, jumps and obstacles. You literally only need left, right and go buttons. It looks simple, but the further you go, the harder it gets. The goal is a long way off but the checkpoints are frequent and the retries are infinite which is the beauty of Trials’s replay factor.

Trials HD had a very much down-and-dirty-in-a-warehouse feel to it so it’s nice to see some outdoor variety in tracks. You can ride around lakes, through docks and across mountains. Red Lynx also plays around in true Trials spirit by giving you war-themed tracks and tracks up in the sky. Perspective also changes slightly on the tracks now with your rider curving to one side as the camera follows and you get a better sense of the track following a different path rather than the straight-up right to left of the last game. The insanity factor has also been increased in single player mode with even crazier stunts. It starts off easy with a lift you have to make a dead stop on before progressing to good old catapulting pieces of track and even water jets. You get money and medals for finishing the race well, and you can spend the money on various bits of kit to customise your bike and rider.

Multiplayer mode is brand new but it fits seamlessly with the rest of the game, slapping a few riders on a track and letting them go at it. You all race alongside each other. If you crash, you’ll reappear further on in the track once the last racer has reached a certain point. This checkpoint recovery system works well and means that even if someone crashes a million times (like me) they still have an even chance of finishing in a decent place, even more so if you allow bailout finishes. Bailing out means flinging your character off the bike with reckless abandon across the finishing line. If you time it right, someone who was previously last can come first with the pathetic broken body of their racer. Time it wrong and said racer lands flat on his face with no points. And that’s how the multiplayer mode works: depending on where you finish and how many crashes you had, you’re given a score which tallies up. Multiplayer matches work in ‘heats’ across tracks; usually there are seven tracks to get through in a mini-tournament. It’s a welcome addition to Trials that makes you wonder why it wasn’t added before because it’s so much fun!

The Skill Games are back with old favourites and new additions. My current favourite type of game is seeing how far you can get with minimal fuel, having to rely on downward slopes to build momentum. In other games, your rider is given skis, or even little cardboard/wooden wings like a good old Flying Man competition – you have to launch him off a jump and desperately help him flap his arms by button-mashing.

Trials Evolution also has Track Central, where you can build and share your own tracks. Red Lynx started the community off with tracks inspired by Foosball, Angry Birds and Super Meat Boy and everyone’s really started to run with the concept. It doesn’t have to be just about riding and jumping bikes, either. One of the demo levels involves rolling a ball around an obstacle course, and of course the Angry Birds ‘track’ involves flinging your bikers at red barrels.

It’s Trials with more of what made you love Trials in the first place, and some bonuses to boot. An absolute gem of a game which shows that the best casual sequels offer more of the same but even better. I spent about ages at the launch event in the same room, watching a bunch of people try to finish a track with the best time. My time of 1:24 (ish) was pathetic compared to the 0.50 (ish) that was the winning time, and even before the competition was ending, people were trying to shave literal milliseconds off their times. That’s what Trials is about: finishing fast, finishing well and then bragging about it.