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Videogames -
Reviews
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Written by Murphy Simmonds
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Friday, 04 September 2009 12:34 |
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Trials
Xbox Live
Red Lynx / Microsoft
Trials HD is an anger management tool disguised as a videogame. In it, you must guide a man on a motorcycle along a series of lumpy, bumpy, jumpy courses without letting him fall off. He goes from left to right in a delightfully simple two-dimensional fashion, while your Xbox 360 renders him and the landscapes he inhabits in three dimensions to make everything look nice and modern. And all you need to do is squeeze the right trigger to accelerate and the left trigger to brake and tilt the thumbstick forwards or backwards to tilt the man, and thereby tilt the bike. It's very simple.
This is how it begins: you fire up the game, dive into a tutorial level, fall off a bit, then get to the end and start racing through the first few tracks. The controls are fun. You'll fall off now and then, but you'll hit Y to warp back to a checkpoint and instantly try again. By the fifth track the controls have become more than fun. They're a joy. You'll ride some more, fall off again but get back up just as quickly, and by the time you've done all the beginner tracks it dawns on you that the controls are nothing short of sublime. This is the peak. Enjoy it. Madness lies beyond.
You can't say Trials gets worse, but once the game takes its stabilisers off and plunges you into the belly of its increasingly fiendish course collection, the high flying glee is gradually usurped by a demand for precision that verges on the demonic. After a few hours your focus becomes not mere completion, but perfect runs on each course, spurred on by the in-game medal tiers and the constantly updated track times of your Xbox Live friends.
Then the moment will come. You'll fall again on your 30th retry of a track and reach, spirit finally broken, to cast the controller from your furious hand... before numbly hitting restart and losing another half an hour to the same few jumps. Your descent will be complete.
There are diversions. Skill games extracted from the brilliant physics, a level designer and the chance to download levels from others (although only people on your friends list, currently, which completely hamstrings that idea). But eventually Trials HD will boil down to you, your instant restart button and enough repressed anger to heat a jacuzzi, as you try to whittle a near perfect run from 100 attempts at the same track.
How long you last once you hit that roadblock is up to you. But the ride there is a breath of fresh air. Pure, addictive, ostentatious retro revisionism which is worth the asking price, and then some.
8/10
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