Video Game Review: Urban Trial Freestyle

Urban Trial Freestyle: Where Flash Trumps Substance

There is no avoiding the likenesses between Urban Trial Freestyle and the Trials series. The previous, being a shiny new game coming after a few Trials titles, including two very successful XBLA games, is constantly going to attract in cries of copycat. Part of that might be due to ignorance over the fact that motorcycle trials are a real thing, albeit something that isn't especially popular in the U.S. In any case, being founded on a similar game or movement implies sharing a great deal in like manner. Past those rudiments Freestyle puts forth some attempt at separating itself, despite the fact that it neglects to do as such in any capacity that genuinely makes it unrivaled.

Much the same as Trials, Urban Trial Freestyle is a game about equalization. You race preliminaries bicycles through 2.5D conditions while moving your weight forward and in reverse and practicing control with the choke with an end goal to abstain from tumbling off.

Not every event is a race to the finish, as in Trials; those do exist, but you'll also spend time on each level completing objectives located at specific points like high jumps, long jumps, speed checks. You're never needed to surpass a specific benchmark; you basically do as well as can be expected on each trick as you advance toward the completion, which must be reached in under five minutes. The sooner your make it to the finish the more bonus points you'll receive, but the allure of returning to a checkpoint and retrying a stunt can be hard to oppose when every one has a going with leader-board and an in-level sign of its top player.

It's easy to blow several minutes trying to top yourself on a stunt, which is a determined hazard as coming back to the latest checkpoint implies spurning the score you've just set.

The variety of stunts initially seems great, though you soon realize there are only a handful that are repeated throughout. That's not necessarily a problem, and not just because the injection of race events keeps you from seeing the same stunt challenges as many times in a row as you otherwise would. The unexciting times where you're merely asked to execute a flip off a ramp are made up for by the more exciting stunts -- the ones were you're racing along the top of a moving train that sends your bike into a ramp, launching it high into the air to pull off a flip, or the one where you have to try climbing up a vertical shaft. It's these more creative challenges that make the stunt events preferable to the standard races.

The other big differentiating factor for Urban Trial Freestyle is the busyness of its levels, which are far more alive (in a way) than those in Trials. As you drive through a level, you might witness firefighters putting out a fire, a truck nearly rolling over as it breaks to avoid hitting you, a bridge collapsing to provide you with a new ramp, or a plane flying just overhead as it comes in for a landing. This all makes the levels more memorable than those in Trials, and there's often so much to look at that it's difficult to take in on your first go.

Fortunately, you'll have more than one opportunity to take it all in, as one of the drawbacks of these busier levels appears to be that it limited the number of them that could be created. You'll visit levels more than once as they are used for stunt and race events, and again and again should you fail to obtain enough stars (dictated by your times and scores) to unlock later levels. Replaying levels isn't such a terrible thing at first, but these repeats often don't come as far apart as I'd like. They do provide you with the opportunity to spend some time exploring the levels and experimenting with ways to collect the money scattered throughout (used to customize your bike by modifying its speed, acceleration, and handling with the installation of new parts), which I enjoyed doing.

However, the problem with this is it allows you to see how hokey the vast majority of the visual flare is. While there are occurrences which do provide some sort of obstacle for you -- a box being thrown in front of your bike, a car tumbling down a hill, a piece of machinery swinging in front of you -- the vast majority of what happens doesn't impact you or have any tangible effect. Go slowly or backtrack and you'll see the police who draw their weapons on you are aiming at a specific spot and aren't actually reacting to your presence.

The plane that flies overhead and vehicle that almost runs you down can be triggered so that you miss them almost entirely. When any of this happens, much of the magic is lost -- and that's before accounting for the fact that most of this gets old after seeing it a few times.

Cool as it is the first time around, I'd rather see more levels with less going on so that there is more to go back and replay afterward.

Final Words

All that said, Urban Trial Freestyle is enjoyable to an extent in the absence of a Trials game on PS3, even if it does feel thoroughly outclassed by Trials Evolution and its more precise controls, breadth of content, and more interesting mini-games. (Although I must say I was pleasantly surprised by one of Freestyle's mini-games where the Six-axis is used to alter gravity as you race through a course. Alas, it can be completed in a few minutes and provides little reason to play it again.)

The game might appear to be preferable to people who are uninterested in mastering Trials' more advanced techniques -- Urban Trial Freestyle is comparatively easy -- and want something more exciting to look at, but when you see how few levels there are or when some of the environmental challenges (like being launched into the air by a beam after something falls on one end of it) fail to work properly because you were ever so slightly out of position, you'll question your desires pretty quickly. For anyone more interested in playing a better, more well-rounded game than one that is flashier, Trials remains the premiere trials bike game out there.