Trials Fusion: This is a horrible thing to do to yourself.

I tend to be a bit of a crabass when it comes to digital distribution of my video games. With things likes DRM controversies being more prevalent (still mad at you Capcom/EA), I tend to be a big proponent of having a physical copy of my games. No so much that I trade or cell my games, but that when I pay for something, I want to have a physical product that I can claim as MINE. Because of this I don't tend to purchase much stuff from PSN or XBLA respectively.

Steam has grossly weakened my defenses to this philosophy with their crazy sales, but since I was so adamant about it, I missed out on a lot of good arcade games. One such series was the Trials series by RedLynx games. Now as a fan of RoosterTeeth, I've seen plenty of videos on the game, and it just looked frustrating. Funny videos though, and that is pretty much all it took for me to be willing to try it. The demo of Trials HD was fun enough but it was never enough to move me to buy the game. However, I do have this shiny new PS4 and have been looking for stuff to play on it, so why not give the new one a shot?

TRIALS FUSION

Is there a long running narrative with the Trials series? I know there has been over ten installments of the game but from where I stand there doesn't appear to be an overarching story. Am I playing young motocross upstart Tad Tadderson? Out to prove that he's the most talented rider by riding over mountains of garbage or things that can explode and kill him all the while jumping his bike off cliffs? Fuck'd if I know and frankly I don't think you are supposed to care.

Although, perhaps that isn't totally true. As you play through the game your rider is given a tutorial from an automatic voice called "Cindy" she is upbeat sounding and perky and she basically gives you the instructions for how to play the game. And at first I kinda just shrugged it off in a "yeah yeah, just get to the fucking game" kinda fashion.

Many of the jumps will result in major airtime

But as I played along the game and completed more courses, I realized her tone of voice would change, she'd get a little more personable, friendly, like she was becoming emotionally attached to the rider. As the levels get more difficult and more chaotic, she starts to show empathy and concern for you. Even further still, she seems to be struggling with some form of internal guilt, as if she wants to share some big secret with you. There is also a secondary automated voice that she will go back and forth with in regards to the rider. 

I don't want to go into what exactly she had to say because they did a pretty good job with it, and I don't want to play spoiler. But I will say that it was an interesting way to weave a story into a game that basically had none, and made it much more interesting to listen in when she had something to say. I would akin it to how Portal weaved a story in with its tutorial, only without the psychotic charm of GLA-DOS.

Set in the future, the maps are set over varied terrain types.

Trials Fusion is one of those fucking infuriating titles that seems deceptively simple all the while managing to be incredibly difficult. I sort of had a feeling this might be the case going in but it certainly didn't stop me. The controls of this game are functionally simple. You have a gas, you have a brake, you can lean forward, you can lean backward. If your jump is high enough, you can do tricks. Essentially that is all of the function that you get in the game. Its all predicated on the physics of the lean of your character and the amount of gas or break you hit.

I have heard it described as a knock off version of Excitebike and I have to mostly disagree with that statement. I say mostly because playing the game in its single player mode is a grossly different experience to Excitebike and when compared to playing it in multiplayer.

When playing single player you are started off on a tier of difficulty starting from beginner and working its way up to extreme. You are started at the beginning of the track and all you need to do is push forward until the game says you hit the finish. It clocks your time and gives a medal ranked on how fast you were. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, at first it is. Usually you get long straights to pick up the pace and series of jumps where you want to make sure you have your wheels below you when you hit the ground. Hell, ya might even do a front flip for style.

The ATV is a heavy ride, but the most stable. I've usually got the fastest times
from this option when it was available.

Don't expect this to be the norm though. Because as you play the track starts to add jumps that you need to time your distance correctly, land on hovering platforms, go up incredible steep walls, get over barrels and mines that blow up, make jumps without ramps, and so forth. Considering the lack of controls and the fact that there is no jump button, the difficultly increases substantially.

You aren't totally left to the wolves though because periodically through out there map there are checkpoints. So if you bail off your bike ore miss a jump, you can easily tap a button and you will be back to the last checkpoint you cleared. The timer continues as you go and you will have lost all your momentum so getting yourself back on track can sometimes be hard, and to make matters worse the game also keeps a running count of how many times you hit that button so when you finish the track, on top of the time it took you to complete it you will also be marred by the number of faults it took you. It's a humbling experience. You could always restart the track from the beginning, but that doesn't make things any easier.

The difficulty of the platform ramps up like crazy in the later stages.

Another subtle little insult the game likes to throw at you is when you start up a track that some friends have already played, you will have a little helmet icon with their name on the track with you when you play, so you can see just how fast they cleared it, roughly the path they took and where they got stuck. However, this only shows the friend who completed it the fastest. This is infuriating because you might be stuck in a certain spot trying to figure out how to clear a jump, and you'll just watch your friends ghost whiz by you and make you look idiotic. Eff you Redlynx, I can see how badly I am doing on my own.

There are also skill missions now where you have to try to get the highest trick total you can on a course which gives the game kind of a 2D SSX Tricky kinda feel to it if that makes any sense. Or there are challenge ones where you have weird restrictions like how far you can go without leaning on your bike. They add some ripples to gameplay and you usually get one or two of them per level of difficulty. 

The multiplayer experience I would say is more like the traditional Excitebike in the regards that you have four riders on 4 tracks. You can't shift up and down between tracks so you can't make the riders behind you tumble. Everyone has the exact same track to do and its a race to the finish on shorter and somewhat simpler courses. You won't get the crazy impossible jumps or precision platforming to do as it is a race after all.  If you bail or crash you are brought back at the next checkpoint so you are always still in the race. It was lets plays of this mode that made me want to actually play the game. But what I found bizarre is that there is only local multiplayer of this mode. I sort of appreciate that in this day and age because playing a game like this with your friends in the room is certainly more fun, but come on now Redlynx. I don't have that many friends. 

Now I would say the length of this game is directly proportional to a couple of things. Primarily how competitive you are, or how perfectionist you are. If you have either of these two traits you might be in for the long haul. As I mentioned, when you play a level and win, you are awarded a medal and for a while I was doing a pretty good job of getting golds. But after you complete all the levels and see the "end" of the game, it then unlocks platinum medals for faster times. Well fuck, back to the start I go looking for that perfect run on each track. (Spoiler: Its not happening)

In addition to this, on top of seeing your fastest friends ghost on your track (if they have the #1 time on your friend list) the game also will notify you of how many of your friends did better than you on a track. At time of writing I have only one other PS4 friend who has the game, and he knows who he is, but every time I log back into the game I can see that his dumb ass smashed more of my times. Which means that I have to go back and try to outdo him. The tracks are only like 2 minutes long, but I might be looking to give up 90 minutes trying to best him.

But the other big point is the track creator. Users can go online and create tracks for other users to play and rate. They are sorted out according to difficulty and some of them will be featured by Ubisoft and Redlynx. This is not a feature I would use all that often. I tried to dabble with the creator and it just came off as way too complicated for me. However, at time of writing there has already been ten thousand tracks created on the PS4 and its possible they are making tracks cross playable between consoles.

Because of this, I can very easily log into the game and find some new tracks to play, giving the game fairly limitless potential to continue to provide me content. And that is not something that I see all that often with the game.

There only real technical problem I have with the game comes into the fact that I think is only a problem because its a downloaded title. It might be the console itself, it might be my shoddy internet connection but occasionally I get a little bit of some slower and choppy menus. Its not always prevalent, and thankfully its not an issue when I am actually on the play track. I can reload the level or the checkpoint instantaneously and that is something I greatly appreciate. Especially in a game like this one where you will be starting over often.

I didn't really pay attention to the link so I bought the full version with the season pass, so it seems some DLC in my future, but aside from more tracks I am not sure how they will change the game all that much. In retrospect I probably could live without the DLC but I don't feel like I overpaid for the game. I clearly got 40$ worth of entertainment for it.  A good way to keep that in perspective is remembering that as a child I paid 50$ for Wrath of the Black Manta when I got my first NES... And that game was shit.

So I'm torn. I like this game, but fuck this game. Its a simple mechanic that is fun to play and challenging. But there is nothing more infuriating than seeing a friend's time fly past me, or having to hit reset on the level and see that big stinking 390 attempts and climbing in the upper corner insulting me the whole time. Its one of those games that I know with certainty that I will NEVER complete no matter how much I play it. So its replay value is incredible. Is a deep game? Ehhh, probably not. I probably could have gotten one of the old ones and had the same effect.

It was fun to play, and has some addictive qualities for the completionist, but its not really going to set the world on fire. It did what it needed to for me, provided a buffer between my next major game.  4 out of 5.