Ifj you hadn't guessed by the title alone, this piece is about RedLynx's fantastic Trials Evolution, a game I'm given to gushing about at every possible opportunity. I'm hopelessly addicted to it, it's the gaming equivalent of crystal meth. There are few games out there any more that are as relentlessly playable and unapologetically hardcore as Trials Evolution that at the same time, are as inviting to the casual crowd.
In fact, the early part of the game is custom made to hook you in. The first time you boot up the game, you're treated to a blast of dumb, yet fun, cock-rock/rap by a man who clearly loves Trials a little bit too much, which sets the tone for the rest of the game. Once you're into the game proper, you're given a bike, a very short lesson in how to control it, then the game turns you lose on a set of tracks that let you blast through them with the throttle buried and barely a thought of crashing. Basically, this is a stroke of genius. If you're having a ton of fun within moments of starting, you're more likely to persevere when the difficulty starts to ramp up. Thankfully, Trials Evo wants you to learn how to play it. Within a few minutes, you've blitzed through the first few tracks and lo and behold, the game has already given you a new and faster bike. By now the game has it's claws in you and you barely notice the subtle drip feed of slightly more advanced techniques in the next licence test. From here you're on the slippery slope to where I have arrived now.
I both love and hate Trials Evolution in equal measure. Despite only dipping into it when I'm in between games, I've scrambled to the top of it's not inconsiderable difficulty curve, after having spent the best part of forty hours with it. While the game has a sunny disposition and a goofy sense of humour, it's still hard on those people who choose to try and attain it's gold medals. People like me. If you don't care about golds, and want to just finish it's tracks you're fine. You have five hundred faults and half an hour at each location to play with. You can laugh along with the level designer who thinks its funny to put a bottomless pit, a fire, a crusher, or a stack of TNT underneath a particularly difficult obstacle. If you're trying to finish the level under a set time and fault limit, you'll soon be cursing that same level designer to the deepest, darkest and most painful of all the Hells. The thing is, once you do come in under those limits, the sense of achievement that comes with it is unrivalled by pretty much any other game out there. You feel like you've scored a victory over RedLynx themselves.
Mastering the game means mastering a physics system that encourages care, accuracy and practice, practice, practice and rewards silly mistakes with embarrassment at best or a bone crunching accident at worst. While the licences you take when you unlock each bike give you the fundamentals, there's no substitute for experimentation. A lot of the fun I find in Trials is working out just where to wheelie, when to pop the rear suspension, working out when power and speed isn't the best option. I'm by no means amazing at the game, compared to those at the top of the leaderboards, I'm slow, scrappy and barely in control, but I've worked through and got gold on every track in the game bar the extreme levels. The physics mean that no two failures are ever exactly alike, which along with the sometimes punishing difficulty, just adds to the onemorego-ness of it all.
While the game can be punishing, it's never unfair. Is that slope too steep or that gap too wide? Keep practicing. The consistent physics and the unchanging nature of most of the landscape makes you the main variable in the task of getting over that troublesome obstacle. Often, the only reward for all the practice is an entry at the bottom of the leaderboard and the knowledge that you've harpooned your white whale, but amazingly, that really is enough. To use the drug reference again, it's like a tiny little high, and once you've got it, you're already starting the next track, craving another hit of the sweet, sweet sense of victory.
But what happens when there are no more tracks? Cook up some more! And if you can't do that, there's a huge community of really talented people who can do it for you. Trials comes with a really comprehensive level editor, one so deep you can make entirely new games within it. I've not even scratched the surface of what it can do myself, but some of the things that come out of the Trials community are really amazing. Even though there are two fantastic DLC packs with two new areas with an entire game's worth of extra content, including the fabulous Gecko 520 BMX, you could probably play a new community track every hour of every day for the next year and still be able to find content you haven't seen. While I do recommend the DLC, if only for the BMX, you don't need it, thanks to the community, even vanilla Trials Evolution has a depth of content that is almost bottomless.
I really can't say enough good stuff about this game. It's a game you can only get better at, a game that changes as you play it, from straight up racer, to platformer, to puzzle game. Even replaying early tracks on faster bikes creates new challenges. Bumps that wouldn't trouble you on a slow bike suddenly become kickers that upset the fastest bikes as you hit them. The same screen four player mode is an absolute hoot when your mates are together and on top of all that, you can dip in and out of it and play it in bitesize chunks when you have a bit of downtime. You know those leaderboards I mentioned earlier? They track your friends too, and the game shows a ghost of your fastest friend to compete with on the track you're racing on. It's a great carrot-on-a-stick that makes you play and play until you've beat them, and when you do, instantly text them to tell them you've knocked them of the top spot. It was my favourite game of last year, and if it wasn't for Bioshock Infinite, it would probably be my favourite game of this year too.
The most significant testament to Trials Evolution's brilliance and accessibility is this. If I leave the Xbox for more than a minute when I'm gaming with my girlfriend, I can guarantee that she's saved and quit whatever I've been playing and has fired up Trials. Usually, by the time I've returned, she's hard at work chasing my best times and will often have absolutely demolished one or two of them. And if you think I can get her to relinquish the control pad when she's her Trials on, well, it's a funny thing to see me try.
Best of all, a version with all the DLC is now available on Steam, so there's another barrier to entry taken away. If you haven't played it, download the trial of Trials, (hur-hur) and give it a go. Trust me, you'll be hooked by the time you've finished with it.
You may even end up wanting to gush about it to the whole internet, like me.
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