Riders Republic - From the creators of Steep

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This is a new IP that was unveiled at Ubisoft Forward yesterday. I never played Steep, but I am incredibly excited for this game. It looks like a mashup of so many games; The studio is using their expertise on Steep and combining it with other extreme sports and battle royale game modes. The scale looks very promising!

Cinematic Trailer


Game Preview
 
Yeah im looking forward to this one as well, a Steep sequel that expands on the types of sports is really cool, similar to how The Crew improved its selection of vehicle types for its sequel.
 
loved the trailer for this. 5 minutes of extreme action. I just hope this lives up to the idea. Steep was good but just felt a bit too lacking in certain areas. If they can refine the feel along with all the additions and give a slightly more structured feel to the play then this will be great.
 
Had a feeling that any potential sequel would focus on summer mountain sports. Surprised they’re adding snowmobiles, though. They were always highly requested, but motorised sports never seemed like what the franchise was about.
 
This was supposed to release in February but now it's not coming for a while
 
Really liking the look of this and I wasn’t even aware of it’s existence if I’m honest, getting SSX Tricky vibes from what I’ve seen :cheers:
 
I also got a bit of SSX Tricky vibes. But it also feels fresh, I don't recall any game quite like this. I'm excited for it...the downhill mountain biking and mass races look seriously fun.
 
The NDA for the beta is over now since the beta was made public today. I played for around 15 hours and unlocked each sport. To me, none of the game feels as good as other games, it tries to be SSX, Steep, and Descenders, with having the atmosphere of Dirt 5, but doesn't do what aspects it has of those games as good as those games.
The snowboarding and skiing isn't as precise as Steep or as wild as SSX, there are not as many bike controls as Descenders has, and the dialog might somehow be more cringeworthy than Dirt 5. It also really tries to be THPS with famous songs from the games and a few sound effects so similar I wouldn't be surprised if a lawsuit is filed.
Also the snowmobiles bounce off things and send all of the momentum completely the other way immediately but hopefully that is just a glitch in the beta that will be fixed, but even if that's the case they are still boring to drive. The graphics are nothing special as well, I only had an invite to the PS4 version, but it still looked quite worse than the PS4 version of Steep. The videos I've seen of next generation gameplay don't look much better.
For the good things, the map is big and diverse with multiple areas that suit an individual sport each well. This should make strategy important like when to shift from snowboard/ski to snowmobile in order to gain more speed and ultimately pull off bigger tricks later. Also, the variations of sports are cool such as the rocket bike and parachute with a motor.
Lastly, there are a lot of events plus interactions in freeroam. Each sport has events correlating to all aspects of it and there are countless NPCs that will do tricks and race around the map. The game does feel "alive", but it quickly becomes that in the sense of " watz crackin' fellow zoomers" with all of the generic yells and one liners written by rich people with an average age of 62. I guess if you liked that in Dirt 5, you will love it here.
Overall, there is a lot to do, but none of it is as good as other more focused games. I see it as a glorified party game for kids given the basic controls, many small events, and atmosphere that I am too old to think of a good word for. This is just a beta, so maybe things will get more fleshed out and professional writers will be hired within the two months until the full game releases, but I'm not feeling too sure of that, so right now I rate the game 5 out of 10 with the potential of much improvement but the expectations of a more cringy OnRush. Many good ideas that are poorly executed making a game that feels like a ripoff with shaky creative direction.

I will post gameplay clips soon.
 
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The NDA for the beta is over now since the beta was made public today. I played for around 15 hours and unlocked each sport. To me, none of the game feels as good as other games, it tries to be SSX, Steep, and Descenders, with having the atmosphere of Dirt 5, but doesn't do what aspects it has of those games as good as those games.
The snowboarding and skiing isn't as precise as Steep or as wild as SSX, there are not as many bike controls as Descenders has, and the dialog might somehow be more cringeworthy than Dirt 5. It also really tries to be THPS with famous songs from the games and a few sound effects so similar I wouldn't be surprised if a lawsuit is filed.
Also the snowmobiles bounce off things and send all of the momentum completely the other way immediately but hopefully that is just a glitch in the beta that will be fixed, but even if that's the case they are still boring to drive. The graphics are nothing special as well, I only had an invite to the PS4 version, but it still looked quite worse than the PS4 version of Steep. The videos I've seen of next generation gameplay don't look much better.
For the good things, the map is big and diverse with multiple areas that suit an individual sport each well. This should make strategy important like when to shift from snowboard/ski to snowmobile in order to gain more speed and ultimately pull off bigger tricks later. Also, the variations of sports are cool such as the rocket bike and parachute with a motor.
Lastly, there are a lot of events plus interactions in freeroam. Each sport has events correlating to all aspects of it and there are countless NPCs that will do tricks and race around the map. The game does feel "alive", but it quickly becomes that in the sense of " watz crackin' fellow zoomers" with all of the generic yells and one liners written by rich people with an average age of 62. I guess if you liked that in Dirt 5, you will love it here.
Overall, there is a lot to do, but none of it is as good as other more focused games. I see it as a glorified party game for kids given the basic controls, many small events, and atmosphere that I am too old to think of a good word for. This is just a beta, so maybe things will get more fleshed out and professional writers will be hired within the two months until the full game releases, but I'm not feeling too sure of that, so right now I rate the game 5 out of 10 with the potential of much improvement but the expectations of a more cringy OnRush. Many good ideas that are poorly executed making a game that feels like a ripoff with shaky creative direction.

I will post gameplay clips soon.
This is a shame and I was worried it might be the case. The idea seems so great, but if the execution isn't there then it's all for nothing. I might still pick it up just for the uniqueness of it, but I'll need to see some more raw gameplay first.
 
I agree with his write up. It's very janky and lacks smoothness, there's moments of genuine fun, the bikes are great, the skiing and snowboarding is the same as Steep, the snowmobiles are garbage, the AI is garbage. But the map is enormous and very beautiful.
 
It's basically steep with watered down physics to appeal to the masses, not that Steep was that realistic. And bikes thrown in, the rocket wings are ridiculously nerfed since Alaska 😂 😂 😂 played a bit of the beta will buy it if they've ****ed up the Snowboarding it will be on ebay the next day
 
I think I'm still going to get this, though maybe just for the console I already have (XBO-S). Anyone else getting it? Maybe we can put together a GTPL crew.
 
Oh well, I was partially interested when it was first announced for the bike stuff, but dang if it doesn't sound like I'll save a fair chunk of change by ignoring it.
 
The Kotaku article pretty much mirrors my experience with the Open Beta - The game was on my radar but after getting a feel for the game, it did feel overwhelming. On the plus side, the presentation is on-point (yes, I could tolerate the cheesy attitudes of the characters) and the graphics are very good, but I didn't gel with the gameplay and I'm pretty much put off playing this game until it becomes a free title or ends up in the bargain bin.
 
I think the article had some agenda behind it but it has some accuracy regardless.

I do feel the railroading of events is basically an elongated intro to get you a feel of every discipline in the game, and there are plenty, before letting you loose.

I’ll echo my earlier thoughts in that it’s a very good looking map with lots of fun stuff to do, but janky at times but plays well enough as long as you aren’t expecting that Skate level of ‘realism’. I think I enjoy how it plays because it’s a bit like a hardened Tony Hawks level of realism and difficulty, pick up and play rather than spend hours learning.

I probably won’t buy it at launch but there’s enough there for me to pick it up eventually.
 
I ended up getting it. The first hour or two is relentless railroading of different activities, but after that it seems to chill a bit. I've not yet unlocked snow racing but the bike racing is pretty fun...once you set the deadzones on the steering to zero.

My biggest complaint with the game so far is the inability to have different trick control presets for the different disciplines. After a lot of trial and error (and a lot of searching) I finally found a trick mapping that worked for me on the snowboard/skis (right stick to preload, left stick to control mid air rotation) but that same mapping is awful for the bikes because you start spinning around in the air and camera movement is either disabled or tied to jumping in a tremendously unhelpful way. I find myself having to remap the controller every time I do a different event. I really hope they fix this, otherwise I'm probably going to silo the whole tricks thing.

The bike controls don't feel particularly refined, I hope they get better but I'm not expecting it.

The world is pretty beautiful, even on base Xbox One, and the performance has held up admirably - frame rate feels reasonably solid.

I've experienced a lot of hangs though...typically between cut scenes where the game just seems to get stuck for 5-10 seconds.

The dialogue in the game isn't great....but also not as bad as I was thinking it might be. I know a few surfers out here in CA...it's honestly not far off the mark.

The game definitely has some atmosphere backed up by a pretty bold art style and color pallet. I dig it.

I'd give it a fairly charitable 7/10. The biggest thing it has going for it is that it's pretty unique.
 
I love this game - just perfect to chill out on for a bit - the open world is massive and has some stunning locations to find,in fact its one of my favourite worlds in any game. The gameplay reminds me of the cross between SSX and Steep - the fast downhill biking sections can be exhilarating. The fact that ive only found 20 out of the 500 collectibles after about 5 hours just shows you how big the map is..
 
After getting more familiar with the controls and putting together a control scheme that works decently well across the disciplines, I've been having a blast in this game.

Caveat: I still am nowhere near satisfied with the bike handling - it's just not precise nor sharp enough and the inability to control weight transfer (no wheelies? no stoppies? no manuals? c'mon!) limits the experience. You have to be very deliberate with your inputs (especially if you keep the stupidly big deadzones unchanged) and if you get it wrong, you probably won't be able to correct it. I find myself steering much earlier than is intuitive and with full lock just to get the bike to turn and sometimes that much is too much. I find it frustrating as hell. The road bikes handle particularly bad and riding them bears no resemblance to real life road bike technique. I would be really happy if Ubisoft adds a "sim handling" mode to either this game as an update or a future sequel. Perhaps the right stick could be deployed as the weight balance control, that would be a pretty fun way to control a bike.

That said, again, I really like the game. The size of the map combined with the relatively slow speed of most of the activities makes the world feel genuinely huge. I had this pretty incredible experience of setting off from the Teton glacier at just before dawn, heading east and then south on the deep snow skis with French 79's Diamond Veins playing, seeing the sun slowly rise. It took 15 minutes to reach the bottom of that run and it just felt so special.

It would be such a joyous experience if they just added a more nuanced handling mode.
 
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