When I first saw the trailer, it looked like a good time to mindlessly play for fun. And was I right! The open world is much, much larger than I anticipated. Every solo and pvp event is on the map for you to explore. You can trick out on bikes, snowboard down a mountain, ski a race, glide through hoops, or test your rocketwing through natural arches. The map is a beautiful blend of real national parks. From snow covered cliffs to red rock stone arches, it's gorgeous. They did an amazing job with the environment.

You can explore with a radio station or turn it off if you prefer. When you first experience a big event with an edited song playing in the background, it gets you pumped! However, there is a downside to having songs tied to events. If you're a completionist, you may have to replay event for stars. Hearing the same song, over and over, was annoying. The radio is limited and you cannot change it during an event. I am burned out on certain songs. The main narrator is overly talkative. I had to mute my sound a couple of times because I wanted to concentrate; not hear his terrible puns for the 47th time.

The sound is a minor complaint. The most complaints I have seen online, and experienced, are about mass races. Every 30 minutes, the game runs an event with 64 players in real time to compete. It can be fun, but frustrating if you're wanting top three. Some of the races use your equipment. Each equipment has its own stats. That means someone can easily pass you if their bike/ski has a higher speed stat than you. Players complained about the unfair balance. So the game added more races to have everyone on the same piece of equipment with the same stats. Now there's an issue of 64 players all bound together by moving the same speed ping ponging together. You can be moving straight, have another player bump into you, and be launched a direction. It's less about stats and more on luck, hoping you aren't tossed around. They need to continue tweaking this but overall the game is well done.

At 70 hours I have earned my platinum trophy. But I did not complete every event, earn every star, or finish every challenge. There's a ton of content and I felt it was well worth it.

I think this is one of those games where you probably already know if it's for you or not.

I really enjoyed Steep, really enjoyed this, will probably really enjoy the next one if it ever gets made.
I found the downhill biking and wingsuit events genuinely quite exciting (especially in first-person) and the various collectibles that are dotted around the giant and varied map were actually pretty fun to collect thanks to all forms of sports being constantly available to you.
The UI is definitely over-complicated and the matchmaking falls apart given everyone is riding with different level transportation (and those levels massively affect the speed at which you travel), but as a single player experience (which, granted, you stupidly cannot access whilst playing offline) I thought this was a blast in which I was more than happy to see to the end of each sports career.

I remember the licensed Steep soundtrack being way better than this though and ended up resorting to playing Spotify from my PS5 whilst playing which works a treat!

Fantastic game, had a lot of fun playing each and every sport. All the mechanics are extremely satisfying while being complex and interesting. I was able to complete all (except for maybe 3) campaign missions on 3 stars except for the ones which required grinding the sponsors to unlock. As for the cons: The graphics are laughable, it felt like 720p with some smoothing. The RNG would not give me 900 bike even on max career level, so I couldn't get 3 stars everywhere. There are kind of a lot of levels which are not that exciting, I wish there were fewer, but more challenging ones. Finally, it was impossible to find enough people to start a match in multiplayer, but the mass races don't have this problem and are very cool, although I see no reason why we should wait like a minute between matches and why there are only 3 maps, it gets boring quick.

I want to like this game a lot more than I actually do. Just like Ubisoft's snowboarding game Steep, Rider's Republic suffers from not having enough JUICE. That SAUCE, dog. I like half of the ideas present here. An all-in-one open world extreme sports fest is cool. Like Forza for people with the world's most exorbitant health insurance premiums. The problem with Rider's Republic is nobody who works at Ubisoft has a soul. It has to be because they're French. With all this flair and no real appeal, this is game is certifiably colonizer core.

Downhill BMX, Trick Snowboarding , Divesuit racing events are the stand outs here. Everything here else is negligible. Everything else here is like accidentally dipping your penis in a high flow toilet while shitting. Everything else here is having a misdemeanor on your record for forgetting to pay a parking ticket. Everything else here is walking barefoot on hot cement. Everything else here is finding out you have a bastard son in Portugal and he trades crypto. Everything else here is Lockheed Martin sponsoring a Pride Parade. Everything else here is getting your car stolen by a 12 year old. Everything else here is getting your college essay be nitpicked for formatting despite knowing more about MLA format than the overworked part-time professor who just ran your document through a program instead of looking at it themselves and you can't get ahold of them to dispute it because they are too busy holding a gun in their mouth deciding if today is finally the day. Everything else here is just like really not great because the physics exist in this state where it doesn't commit to realism or arcade-y style physics and controls and are stuck in this awkward as fuck in between that frankly ruins the experience.