Trials HD is essentially a modern day Excitebike. It's an arcade motorcycle racer that restricts your movement to a 2D plane and sends you careening down wild, complex tracks with the sole objective of crossing the finish line in one piece. Physics are used to great effect for manipulating your bike and interacting with objects in the environment. A track editor is here, too, just like you remember in Excitebike, so you can build your own courses and share them via Xbox Live. There's a lot of content here and Trials HD is a blast as long as the steep difficulty curve doesn't get you down.
This series has been available on PC for a few years with the original Trials and its sequel, Trials 2 Second Edition. Even though the XBLA version isn't called Trials 3, it is the third game in the series and offers new levels and improvements to the editor. What you've got here are 50+ tracks that will test your skill, brain power, and patience. The controls are very simple: the right and left triggers accelerate and break and the left analog stick leans your rider forward and back. Getting to the finish line is anything but simple.
When the game gets going and you're flying by the seat of your pants, careening down a track at breakneck speed, watching everything explode around you, and praying to all that is holy you don't crash, Trials HD is a blast. It's when you get stuck trying to get over some small hill and you see that fault counter in the top left corner counting up (10 tries…25 tries…50 tries…) that the game starts being more frustrating than fun. I don't mind a good challenge, but there is only so many times a person can try to complete a seemingly simple task before their brain shuts down and they want to move on. You'll get stuck in these situations pretty regularly later on in the game. Too often when I would finally, at long last, cross that finish line and get the bronze medal, I would think, "Man, I don't want to ever do that again."
A pretty useful feature is included, though, to help you when you get stuck. Replays are stored for the first 5000 players in each leaderboard, and icons representing the Xbox 360's controller buttons indicate just what controls led them to victory. So you can view these winning runs (which also load instantly) and see how the pros did it. Watching these, you'll start to see there are many advanced tricks for getting past particular tricky sections. It's a shame, though, that the game doesn't really teach these tricks to players.
Rating | Description | |
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out of 10 | Click here for ratings guide | |
8.5 | Presentation An impressive feature set that really takes advantage of Xbox Live. |
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8.5 | Graphics Runs smoothly and sports nice lighting effects. |
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8.0 | Sound The metal soundtrack does a pretty good Metallica impression. Voice work from Viva La Bam and Jackass cast members is pretty obnoxious, though. |
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8.0 | Gameplay It's a blast when the game opens up and sends you careening down rollercoaster tracks. But later levels get bogged down with frustrating challenges. |
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9.0 | Lasting Appeal Trophy hunting adds a lot of replay value and level sharing greatly extends the life of the game. |
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If you were waiting for more things to accomplish as John Ma...
Connections for Trials HD (X360)
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