Riders Republic is overflowing with friendliness towards the player. For whatever reason, bouncing between the different tracks works for me so much better than it has in the past, and I found myself actually relishing Riders Republic’s variety instead of being bogged down by it. Weary and frustrated by the jet-suit races? Try some snowboard tricks to shake the fuzziness out of your skull. Don’t care for the downhill skiing races? Then perhaps the bike trick courses are more to your liking. The player is bombarded with blasts of dialogue that can be best described as “Shaka-Extreeeeeme,” but the end point is that new players are introduced to the game’s mechanics quickly and efficiently, even if the onboarding causes one’s ears to bleed.īut Ubisoft wisely moves the player quickly into the action, rolling out one career path after another, until the player’s in-game map is absolutely slathered with waypoints, each of which is its own unique event. Riders Republic opens with a burst of cool-kid plot and setup, introducing a few characters that you can promptly forget all about, because they don’t matter even slightly. While I don’t enjoy all five career paths evenly, there is more than enough here that I do enjoy to keep me merrily bouncing around the quilt-work mash-up playground that Ubisoft has created. After settling in, I was perfectly happy to bounce between Riders’ five career tracks, engaging with whatever event caught my eye and being satisfied that I was moving the needle in the right direction. I’m not sure what internal calculus was done at Ubisoft to tilt the dynamic a little bit, but Riders Republic feels so much better. Playing through events in Steep made me feel like I was just tossing hunks of meat into an amorphous blob, watching them be absorbed but not really sure if I was accomplishing anything.
I didn’t know what to focus on, and when I did lock in on one activity to enjoy, I felt like I was neglecting the others. The previous games open up so much and so quickly that I often felt as though I was failing at everything equally. Having taken runs at The Crew 2 and Steep, and having been bewildered by the formless structure of both, I didn’t expect that Riders Republic would smooth the curve as much as it has, leaving me fiending for more every time I’m forced to turn off my PlayStation 5 to do stuff like work and eat. I most emphatically did not enjoy Steep, Ubisoft’s last entry in the open-world extreme sports genre – a genre which is, in itself, an entirely Ubisoft-created invention. I am shocked at how much I enjoy Riders Republic.
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