Motorcycles may not seem all that fantastic against higher concepts of fantasy, but that is precisely why they’re so wondrous and terrifying; they exist in real life. In college I wound up taking a Justice Administration course that included a chat with the local coroner. For whatever reason his first order of business was to ask if anyone in the class rode a motorcycle, and when a few people raised their hands all he said in return was, “see you soon.” That’s crazy! Riding a motorcycle alone is crazy, not to mention human beings racing high-powered engines bolted to two wheels and, somehow, living through the experience.
That thirst for competition and inherent quest for survival is part of what makes racing motorcycles so attractive. Games, of course, have tried to exhibit a similar sentiment. Super Hang-On gave us the experience, Road Rash supplied the danger, Manx TT delivered speed, and Tourist Trophy indulged in obsessive recreation. On the periphery are Milestone’s Moto GP and Superbike games, which have slanted toward the simulation end of the scale. By getting the bikes off the course and on to the street, Ride is positioned as more of a free-standing ode to modern motorcycle racing.
Ride finds strength definition. At a surface level, motorcycle and automobile are (kind of) the same thing; combustion engines do their job as you try to efficiently outpace a squad similarly powered vehicles. Motorcycles differ, at least in a simulation, because you’re forced to account for the additional weight of the human being affixed to the top of the machine. In Ride, this means controlling two different sets of brakes and the player’s posture while they’re atop the motorcycle. You don’t exactly have to lean into and out of turns, but Ride’s higher difficulties leave room for much of the nuance you’d expect from piloting a finely tuned death rocket.
Even at easier settings, Ride remains a fundamentally different beast to break. Most obviously, simple collisions and improper throttle/turning decision can eject the rider (though Ride concedes to a respawning time penalty rather than the usual fatal consequences). Other than that, Ride comes a little closer to your average sim-friendly racer. A colored racing line optionally hugs the optimal path for the track, breaking from green to red based on your current speed. Likewise, the track is usually lined with 15 other maniacs, all of whom are vying for the top spot. Ride’s AI is neither aggressive nor especially pedestrian; they’re just kind like obstacles to be overtaken with either gross power or applied skill.
Whether its parts of personal performance, Ride makes either approach viable. Neither, however, comes quickly. I was absolutely terrible at the game for a solid couple of hours. I couldn’t come to terms with the braking system, and I couldn’t stop myself from slipping out of turns and falling off the bike. I was piloting a naked (read: free of traditional go-fast parts and plumage) bike too, which was the closest thing Ride offered to a beginner craft. Bumping the brakes down to a simpler single button helped, but practice aided me more than anything else. Soon, I was relying less and less of Ride’s generous allotment of forgiving rewinds and, instead, operating with the performance expected of constant repetition.
Developed skill finds refinement through over 100 bikes, 14 courses, and numerous configurations inside those courses. The bikes, in particular, are Ride’s more favorable contribution to its genre. All facsimiles of real-life models, they’re rendered with impressive precision and spoken of with a loving attention to detail. You get the feeling that the development team was fawning over their ability to accurately reproduce their favorite machines, and spent the bulk of their time (and perhaps budget) doting on their incredible collection of motorcycles. This sentiment also extends to the myriad of parts available to upgrade and play around with, which also serves as Ride’s core loop; race and getting better parts so you can race more and get even better bikes.
As good as Ride’s rides look, the same can’t be said for the remainder of the presentation. The narrator—who sounds like Patrick Bateman when he’s not buried in the audio mix—is a puzzling supplement. More detrimental is the quality of Ride’s race courses, with Spartan features that barely qualify it as a current generation title. From generic backgrounds and architecture to crowds of on-looking human clones, Ride definitely isn’t a game where you want to stop and smell the roses. Part of me feels like that’s the point—you’re supposed to go fast and focus on the race and your rider—but it’s increasingly difficult when much of the periphery feels so compromised. In all but its suite of bikes, Ride’s presentation feels a few steps behind the bar.
It’s tough not to feel like Ride is gunning for Gran Turismo. This feels strange because the Gran Turismo of bikes was already completed, albeit two generations of hardware ago in the aforementioned Tourist Trophy, but there’s kind of a reason Polyphony requires generous amounts of time and money to perform and perfect every aspect of their craft. On paper Ride kind of delivers—scores of real-world bikes and tracks certainly help—but the entire package lacks the polish of a more accomplished racer. From the certifiably insane load times to the generic music, it feels like Ride bet the farm on its bikes and paid minimal attention to everything else.
Those load times really are something else. The opening race menu contains expected options for adjusting your rider, as well as the intended course and any bike modifications you want to perform. You would expect to proceed to the race after that, and you would be wrong. Instead, you get an extended 30-second loading screen, which takes you to another screen with nothing on it where you have to press X to get to another loading screen. The second loading screen at least has some facts about your bike to button through, but it can’t escape the fact that Ride literally has an intermission for its loading screens. After that there’s a pre-race screen that provides many of the same options you had three loading screens ago. Get through that, and then you get to race. This is insane.
This was also the first domino that started to collapse my enjoyment of Ride. World Tour, Ride’s neatly arranged campaign of different bikes and course alignments, soon buckled under the weight of repetition. Even with different styles of races (like straight challenges against one other aggressive driver, drag races, and team races), Ride’s exhilarating character eventually fades into a tedious milieu of assertive persistence. The loop of wanting to complete races to get better bikes and parts eventually breaks into a dead end, and the speed and power of exciting motorcycles slows into a chore.
I question whether it’s a problem with my interests or a fault of Ride. I think the answer lies somewhere in between. In racing games, I typically lean toward either speed-obsessive jaunts like Wipeout or Dyad or arcade friendly vacations in most of Criterion’s work. Simulations haven’t completely spoken to me since Gran Turismo’s heyday in the late 90’s. Ride’s gifts weren’t adequate enough to rope me back in and play inside of its rules and systems. It’s not just that it’s a simulation, but that its focus is too narrow and its mechanics too unsavory to bridge into a long term commitment.
In the end, Ride aligns neatly with expectations. Milestone created (another) working-class motorcycle simulation with a touch of supernatural forgiveness — and not a whole lot else. Enthusiasts are the target demographic and their complaints will be few. This appears to be whom Ride is for, and they’ll likely be more forgiving regarding the all of the empty space surrounding the bikes. Others may want to pick up Ride at a discount, as there’s little to convince them it’s something more than just another racing game.
