Trails Evolution (Singleplayer) Review

I have a theory. It goes that the average games journalist plays so many turd games that, when a remotely good one comes out, they think it's the best thing ever. This is the only theory I can think of to explain Trials Evolution's 91% on metacritic, including 9 out of 10s from good games sites whose names, for the next twenty minutes, I will not remember.

Trials Evolution is a dirt bike, obstacle course, racing game in which you move two-dimensionally through a 3D environment; i.e. it's a 2.5D platformer. The game attracts young, XBOX 360-owning males via its silly environments, perfect controls, and Looney Tunes murderings of players at the end of every track; by 'silliness,' I mean "being crushed by a piano upon crossing the finish line," and "racing through, say, a level of the Danish (depressing) game Limbo."

And yes, as butt hurt as I am about metacritic scores right now, I'll admit that the new Trials is good. Just its presentation makes me ask, "Why aren't more sports games trying to be less boring? Why are the biggest video game versions of sports games set in the boring fields and courts we see in real life? Why can't the athletes be fed to bears?" "Why is this the first dirt-biking game I've played that lets me race across a D-Day beach and then get bombed (by bombers) as a reward for crossing the finish line?"

Unlike the original game -- Trials HD -- the environments are outside, which gives Evolution a sense of not-being-like-the-claustraphobia-inducing-Trials HD. Also unlike the first game (which you should never ever get, because it might cause you to lose fifteen dollars), this one's been made noob friendly. The difficulty curve of the proceeding tracks rises slowly from "so easy that all you need to do is hold the accelerator button" to "You know what's easier than this? Eating a brick, that's what!" Each track has a difficulty label labled to them, and the harder-to-get medals and friends list scores encourage replayings of all maps, assuming that you have friends who play the game, and assuming that you'll be able to tolerate the checkpoint system, a surprising failure in game design, which I'll later discuss.

But first! The "easy to learn and hard to master" theme is definitely in this game and represented by its three buttons, which are accelerate, break, and move the stick to angle the bike up or down. The bike control is easy to learn because "there are basically three buttons" and its hard to master because of the game's goal requirements -- get past these obstacles in the shortest times and fewest crashes as possible -- and the game's simulated gravity and the way the bike gets angled: the simulated gravity acts like...gravity! And the bike angling works by the driver shifting his weight (via your stick fingering). Pull the stick left, the rider leans back, forcing the front wheel up. Rightwards fingering forces the rider forward and the bike down. This makes even the angles of coming hills a challenge, as landing on them at the wrong angle can break every bone in your virtual body (there's an achievement for doing that).

(We're getting closer to the problem) Every time you crash your bike, you can immediately respawn from the last checkpoint (and there's a check point after every obstacle); respawning from a checkpoint doesn't reset the timer or your number of crashes, though, so if you want the harder tracks' silver and gold medals, or the super difficult platinum medals -- you'll usually find that your medal runs will involve restarting from the beginning to reset the timer and the crash count.

And now, the problem, the checkpoints. There are too many of them.

"What?" You say. "How can there be 'too many' checkpoints? Are you bigoted against noobs?"

No, of course not! Noobs are wonderful...No seriously, that the game is noob-friendly isn't the problem. If a noob wants to spend fifteen bucks and breeze through an explosive-filled, easy-to-learn, visceral, dirt bike, obstacle game in a few afternoons, instead of doing something that doesn't tell them variations of the they-killed-Kenny joke over and over again at the ends of fairly imaginative race tracks, then Trials Evolution! Kill   that time!

Anyways, finally here comes the problem (yay). The problem isn't that the game's easy (it's not easy). The problem is doing its challenges is grindingly frustrating, a frustration caused by how the respawning works at the too-many checkpoints.

Respawning to the checkpoints respawns you stationary and on the ground; thus they're basically incapable of wiring the fast surmounting of obstacles into your muscle memory. All the checkpoints do is help you memorize how to pass the obstacles from a stationary, on the ground position. That won't help  you train for the challenging medals, which usually demand that you pass the obstacles moving fast, and coming in from the sky.

So, for the core gamer looking for a challenge, Trails Evolution is either easy or too frustrating.

I fear (not really) that many gamers, seeing those 9/10s  from good games sites, will tell themselves, "I...I'm not frustrated! That one website said this game's brilliant and that only the metal/rap music is boring and that the in-game money used to buy mostly identical biker clothes and bike decals is useless!" And yes, the clothes and music play too hard for their target audience, and the said ways the game's an elegant thing. But the checkpoint system makes this hardcore gamer proof. Or, smart hardcore gamer proof. If Red Lynx notices the error, or reads my review (which they won't), they'll release a patch that gives players the option to turn half the checkpoints off.

On the brighter side, the game has a stellar level editor (think LittleBigPlanet). Maybe that will spawn greatness. But for now, what we have is a mildly amusing show.

7/10