Rider's Republic is a collection of fun extreme sports gameplay flavors that is tied together in a somewhat bland, cheesy, and overly complicated package.
Once you get through its slow tutorial, filled with Ubisoft's trademark try hard out-of-touch writing, you can tackle some of the sport offerings like biking and skiing, and unlocking more sport disciplines as you progress.
The open world exploration is nothing special, but the racing events and other kind of objective based gameplay are pretty great. These events feel handcrafted and showcase the most exciting parts of the open world. Other highlights include stunts (basically checkpoint based obstacle/traversal challenges) and the multiplayer events. Thankfully you can get around the map pretty quick with fast travel, or fly around with a literal rocket on your back, so you can just do the things you want without wasting too much time. Plus, you can just focus on the sport discipline that interests you the most, you don't have to do everything to progress.
For the most part, the controls of each sport discipline feels good. It doesn't have the most accurate feel, I know I have messed a few of my biking events because my bike didn't quite respond in a way that I expected, but you can get used to it, and there's ways to minimize accuracy-leaning situations, like braking early. I mostly enjoy biking, especially the downhill races where the first person mode truly shines. The high speed feel of this mode is incredibly gratifying, it's easily the best part of the game for me.
Playing the game can feel cumbersome and unintuitive, as the menus and interface are too bloated, and many of the peripheral game systems (stuff like keeping track of your progression) seems unnecessarily complex. While these aren't the most important aspects of the game, it does make me feel dissuaded from taking the game more seriously, and investing more of my time into it to unlock the game's various rewards. In other words, I don't see much staying power here after I blast through the sport events that I'm interested in.
Overall, RR is more than fun enough to enjoy casually, despite its colorful flaws. It's nice to see a big publisher filling out the extreme sports void, and I'm pretty sure Ubisoft will support this game for a while.
Once you get through its slow tutorial, filled with Ubisoft's trademark try hard out-of-touch writing, you can tackle some of the sport offerings like biking and skiing, and unlocking more sport disciplines as you progress.
The open world exploration is nothing special, but the racing events and other kind of objective based gameplay are pretty great. These events feel handcrafted and showcase the most exciting parts of the open world. Other highlights include stunts (basically checkpoint based obstacle/traversal challenges) and the multiplayer events. Thankfully you can get around the map pretty quick with fast travel, or fly around with a literal rocket on your back, so you can just do the things you want without wasting too much time. Plus, you can just focus on the sport discipline that interests you the most, you don't have to do everything to progress.
For the most part, the controls of each sport discipline feels good. It doesn't have the most accurate feel, I know I have messed a few of my biking events because my bike didn't quite respond in a way that I expected, but you can get used to it, and there's ways to minimize accuracy-leaning situations, like braking early. I mostly enjoy biking, especially the downhill races where the first person mode truly shines. The high speed feel of this mode is incredibly gratifying, it's easily the best part of the game for me.
Playing the game can feel cumbersome and unintuitive, as the menus and interface are too bloated, and many of the peripheral game systems (stuff like keeping track of your progression) seems unnecessarily complex. While these aren't the most important aspects of the game, it does make me feel dissuaded from taking the game more seriously, and investing more of my time into it to unlock the game's various rewards. In other words, I don't see much staying power here after I blast through the sport events that I'm interested in.
Overall, RR is more than fun enough to enjoy casually, despite its colorful flaws. It's nice to see a big publisher filling out the extreme sports void, and I'm pretty sure Ubisoft will support this game for a while.