‘Riders Republic’ review: Nature’s Playground - SB Nation

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Riders Republic, the new open world extreme sports video game, seeks to tread a path as dangerous as the sports it represents. Developers at Ubisoft Annecy aimed to balance realistic physics, jaw-dropping vistas and a career of building a reputation while earning real-world sponsors, with an experience where you also ride down the side of a mountain, dressed like a t-rex, wearing a pair of prototype rocket skis. Can this balance of fun and realism work, or is it just a recipe for confusion?

Building off the framework of 2019’s Steep, Riders Republic is its spiritual successor. Moving away from Steep’s Alps, which put players on snowboards, skis, wingsuits and paragliders, Riders Republic has the same disciplines, adding bikes and rocketwings to the mix. This might seem like an incremental addition, but it comes along with a map that dwarfs that of Steep in size, with a mammoth environmental shift in the southern region, representing the deserts and canyons of the southwest — opening up some of the United States’ most iconic natural wonders and turning them into a playground.

After the introduction, which features some frankly cringy cutscenes written by someone who clearly watched a lot of The Office during the pandemic, players are presented with a colossal map and given free reign to explore at their leisure. Using an intelligent quick travel system, the game puts players close to the next challenge, but rarely directly on top of the marker. Riders Republic encourages the player to explore the landscape on the way to their next race or tricks competition, opening up the potential to get lost along the path and find something different to do — and there’s a lot to do.

Outside of the main-line challenges, which takes players on increasingly difficult contests to become the top of their sport, there exist myriad collectables, landmarks to find, and “relics,” which take the form of goofy variants on the existing sports. Many of these are featured in “Shackdaddy Challenges,” which supply some of the highlights of Riders Republic’s career mode. Focusing down on silly versions of the sports you’ve already learned, these challenges may have you complete a race on a pair of skis made out of wooden boards with branches for poles, using a wingsuit made of of a giant paper airplane, or even navigate a steep mountain course on a bicycle overloaded with packs and prospecting equipment.

Riders Republic offers a pretty basic feedback loop. Complete challenges to earn stars, level up your chosen sport disciplines, get rewarded with new gear to make you better at said sport. However, it’s the late-game equipment where this really shines. For much of the game you’re largely getting upgrades that simply make you a better snowboarder, skier, biker or aerialist, but as you unlock “epic” tiers of items suddenly important choices need to be made. Are you willing to take a snowboard into a race that has more top-line speed, but less absorption, risking the chance of bailing on a jump? How about a bike that can handle any terrain, but can’t perform tricks in the air? It offers a unique push and pull that will hopefully lead to longevity in post-release content.

Despite the numerous things Riders Republic does right, there are some infuriating design choices. Ghost players, which serve as the primary competition in the career mode, are puzzling allowed to bump into you on timed runs. When you have no control over the lines of others it can often feel like your perfect run is ruined by a ghost that turns sharp for no reason and messes you up. In addition, too many of the game’s critical “secondary challenges,” required to reach to upper tiers of the game’s content, demand players not use the game’s generous backtracking feature to rewind time. While this makes sense in a trick attack setting, too often the player is asked to make the decision between rewinding a few seconds to go through a gate they narrowly missed, or losing out on the secondary challenges all together. This often results in restarting the event all together, which can result in tedium.

That said, the good far outweighs the bad when it’s all said and done. The greatest accomplishment of Riders Republic beyond the setting, feel, and construction of its events is an ever-present feeling that the player is part of a larger community. Echoing the ethos of the game, which presents the world as a collection of people meeting in the southwest like an extreme sports “Burning Man,” the live map is constantly showing hundreds of markers of players gathering, competing, or just free riding around the map. Whether these players are live, or merely intelligently complied ghosts is of little consequence, the world constantly feels alive, and never lonely in ways Steep often did.

Part of this comes from the game’s extremely smart audio design. Tracks are curated into buckets, playing alongside sports were it mades the most sense. You might be on a desolate winsgsuit ride in Yosemite while Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” relaxes you, or throw down a tricks event to “Black and Yellow” by Wiz Khalifa. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t know if I needed to hear “Black and Yellow” in 2021, or the game’s ABUNDANCE of tracks by The Offspring, but gripes the game’s soundtrack are relatively minor.

One of Riders Republic’s major selling points is its multiplayer content, and I’m happy to say that early experiences with the offerings have been excellent. Whether it’s taking part in free ride races, or throwing down in small trick parks reminiscent of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater’s “graffiti” mode, there are constantly ways to queue for an event and go off on your own to explore while loading into a game.

The biggest differentiator between Riders Republic and other games in the genre are its “mass races,” these events pit as many as 50 players against each other in a three-round series of races which typically involve numerous disciplines. You might start in a downhill bike race, only to take a jump and don your rocket pack to fly for another third of the race, before crossing another checkpoint and getting on your skis. This extreme sports triathlon of sports is a true challenge, awarding players points based on their position, and it feels extremely satisfying to make the podium after three runs, knowing you bested a huge number of people in three distinct sports.

It took me a little over 30 hours to finish the main story’s “quest line,” which sees the player ascend the ranks in every sport to take part in the “Riders Ridge Invitational,” which serves as the story’s finishing point, but I still find myself traveling back to the hundreds of challenges I’ve played before, this time with better gear, to see if I can get the additional stars from completing secondary challenges. Alternatively I find myself just cruising around to find collectibles, or make my wife laugh by backflipping off Grand Teton on an ice cream cart and ragdolling down the hill like Andy Sandberg in Hot Rod, because life is all about balance.

Time will tell whether Riders Republic can cultivate the community it hopes to build around extreme sports, but the framework created by Ubisoft Annecy is extremely special. This game is unlike anything any we’ve seen in the extreme sports genre, and I have a feeling I’ll keep booting it up months from now, just because it’s so damn fun.

The game was reviewed on Xbox Series X using a pre-release download code provided by Ubisoft.

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‘Riders Republic’ review: Nature’s Playground - SB Nation
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