It’s almost five years ago that I played Trials Frontier, the mobile companion to this game. I assumed at that time that I wouldn’t enjoy it as much, and I was right!

I suppose the hook of this Trials instalment is the setting, a futuristic world in the midst of collpase. This gives some fun aesthetics and setpieces but seems divorced from the gameplay. Some forced “eccentric AI” voiceover and attempted lore hints don’t help make this a satisfying part of the game.

As for the motorbiking part, it’s as Trials ever has been: you take a bike through side-on obstacle courses, in a sort of platformer/racing hybrid, coping with very convoluted arrangements of ramps, slopes, tricky jumps, etc. made from environmental objects. The bikes have different characteristics but you never get much guidance on when to use each one; after trial (ha) and error I found myself using the Roach for Medium and lower, and the Pit Viper for Hard.

The lower three of the five difficulty settings were often way too easy for me, Hard covered “fun challenge” to “teeth-grinding frustration”, and I never got more than a few metres into an Extreme track. Depensing on the player’s skill level this scale will slide, but I found that the line between too basic and too demanding was very fine. I get that the very name of the game implies revelling in very testing gameplay, and at least they let you complete the campaign without forcing you to do any Extreme tracks, but I found it so variable that I was having fun less than half the time.

The game uses the drip-feed technique to keep you engaged, with steady unlocks of levels and cosmetics. Didn’t work. I played to see what inventive and absurd tracks the designers would come up with next. The DLC is slightly more interesting than the base tracks in that regard, but disappointingly the unicorn which is so prominently teased and always viewable on the bike selection screen is not usable for the entirety of the campaign levels save for the one small set that it was created for. Still, the (surely intentional?) slight level of jank throughout the game is charming.