One day I’m going to include at least one screenshot or image in these reviews, but this is not that day! Ok fine, here: Trials Evolution is the sequel to the cool motorbike with cryptic hidden secrets game, Trials 2. As far as I currently know, Evolution doesn’t have weird hidden clues but it does have multiplayer. I’ve heard it’s good and it’s kind of a posterboy for XBLA, but it’s also on the (much better) Steam platform. Now, I can’t normally play this game as 1) my computer kinda sucks and 2) it’s not Mac-compatible. But lucky for me, I have a cool family.

So I actually played this game while visiting my family back in my home town. My little brother, this blog’s #1 fan, is a huge PC gamer. I guess you could say that after our childhood playing Nintendo consoles and PC games, he took one path and I the other. The PC is his only gaming device, his phone is even still a monochrome brick. Last year he managed to ditch the aging shared family computer and built his dream gaming rig. As such, many games on the old Steam catalogue that had been purchased and waiting were finally able to be downloaded and played. I’ve enjoyed watching some of these while on visits, such as Europa Universalis 3, Serious Sam, Just Cause 2, and lots of others too, including Minecraft and League of Legends.

But enough about his gaming habits. Often I’m content to watch him play games that I would normally never pick up, but occasionally we’re able to play co-op or take turns. This game supports both, which was much easier due to the wired controller he also picked up at Christmas (he’s been known to emulate Smash Bros 64 and fit 3 guys on one keyboard).

For those who are unfamiliar, the game is an extension of many older games that used the concept of a bike and a reliable physics simulation to pull off tricks and stuff, whether for racing, doing sweet jumps, or exploring a strangely-deisgned level. A few that I’ve played are Bike or Die on the Palm Pilot (exploration) or the more recent Mad Skill Motocross (racing). Trials has elements of the spectrum of these games, especially with the user-created content which can cater to different tastes. Obviously, being a modern game, it does it with sweet graphics and 2.5D presentation (2D play in a 3D world, sometimes with curving tracks etc).

My experience with this, as with those other games, was really fun until the difficulty starts to ramp up, and it gets to be a pretty steep ramp (the game also features literal steep ramps), at which point it becomes very frustrating and you need a break. Having the co-op experience and egging each other on really enhanced it though, whether in direct competition or taking turns.

I could say that there’s maybe not enough multiplayer tracks and content, as we seemed to get through most of it quickly before resorting to the taking turns in single mode, which wasn’t as fun an experience, even if the levels themselves were more varied in that mode. The “challenge” levels were a highlight as they used and abused the mechanics of the game to get you to do some wacky stuff, but the straight biking race challenges which often involved traversing obstacles were very solid.

I’m kinda rambling; the game was lots of fun, but when we tried to explore some of the user-made tracks it got complicated, as we seemed to keep coming up with excruciatingly difficult levels. Apparently you can find some amazing stuff in there though, but I dunno. I wasn’t sold on buying the game myself (even if I had the means to play it) because it seemed to reach that frustration level too quickly, which would likely be even worse when playing by yourself.

I suppose if you found some levels that really suited you, you could have tons of fun replaying them with friends. I tend to like completing content, and moving on to other content but we did replay some tracks and just the act of getting through the track, and bailing before the finish line to try and cross just in front of the other person was a really great experience.

I have on more big nit to pick: for some reason, at a certain point in tracks (we theorised it was when the finish line was “in sight” or one checkpoint away or something), if you crashed you wouldn’t respawn and you got a DNF while the other person kept going. I suppose that’s fair enough, but on the really hard levels when it took ten or fifteen tries to clear an obstacle, it meant we slowly got through most of a track but because of the final or even second-final obstacle were never able to cross the finish line, which to some extent invalidated the progress. The point system could have been tweaked or tweakable in this regard too. That brings up that in a game where users can create tracks with such detailed tools, the gameplay itself wasn’t very customisable. Just a niggling point.

The main thing is that the game just allowed me to have a really fun experience shared with my brother. For that I love it dearly and give it twelve ragdolls gyrating through the floor geometry. Some games can be used as a means to facilitate human social interaction or experiences or relationships; yeah anyway that’s gaming theory from Milo right there. Before I overthink it too much, I’ll bail and flail.