Some mobile games should remain that way
Perhaps at a first glance you might try to compare Red Bull X-Fighters to Trials HD, however they are very similar despite both being dirt bike games viewed from approximately the same perspective. Trials HD puts a strong focus on the physics and performing the same part of the level over and over until it's done right, where as Red Bull X-Fighters is mostly about speed and stunts. On paper this comparison makes Trials HD sound like a tedious grind compared to the dazzling promise of a game made after a prestigious dirt biking competition. Unsurprisingly things don't work out quite that way.
The world of Red Bull X-Fighters is broken down into individual challenges spread across six tracks. These challenges will generally challenge you to either reach a certain score before reaching the goal or reach the goal in under a set time. Achieving these goals earns you fans and medals based on your performance, which in turn unlock new challenges, cosmetic only changes for your rider and better bikes. Obtaining a basic bronze medal doesn't take much effort and all of the game's challenges can be completed in not much more than an hour, by which time you'll have unlocked the best performing bike with which to go back and unlock the gold medals, if you so choose. This setup makes the bike selection rather redundant as all bikes have their speed and acceleration rated out of three stars and the final bike is the only one that scores three stars in all, meaning that you won't ever be working out what might be the best bike for you or for a specific task. Even with the later bike there can still be a fair challenge in getting a gold on all the levels and can often be more frustrating than rewarding.
Performing tricks on the PSP version is achieved by just quickly tapping out a three button combination such as cross, circle, circle but the Xbox Live Arcade version opts for a different and far more clumsy approach. Once you come off a ramp and enter the air you perform a stunt by holding down buttons on the controller such as LB and RT or LT, B and RB with one of the higher scoring stunts requiring you to claw your fingers around to hold LB, Y, B, RT and RB. There are over a dozen stunts in all and the more complex and varied each trip into the air is, the more you'll score. This baffling stunt system doesn't have much depth to it, some stunts can be held, others are just performed once, but beyond that you'll just need to remember the more complex stunts and throw in a few rolls for good measure as fortunately the stunt levels are quite short so you won't be overly penalized for repetition.
The racing challenges are considerably more enjoyable, with the challenge coming from attempting to hold a wheelie to boost your speed, while also making sure that you land from jumps in such a way to keep your speed high. Unlike in many games, performing stunts doesn't give you a speed boost so you're free to focus on speed and how you hit the jumps, which can be a fair bit trickier than it sounds thanks to the way that the physics perform. It can be hard to judge if you're leaning back to far on the wheelie or not far enough when the camera is pulled out too far and jumps can also be tricky. You can hit the same jump at what seems to be the same speed on multiple occasions only to find that sometimes you sail over the next hill, other times you collide straight into it. It would be nice if there was some kind of visual indicator to avoid these issues.
When racing in an event that you have already beaten you're greeted at the starting line by the ghost of your best run. But one side effect of seeing this ghost is that it serves as a reminder to the lack of multiplayer. The online component is restricted to only comparing the times and scores of the top players and friends, without even the option of selecting a ghost to race against or viewing the top performances to see how someone scored so well on a particular level.
The visuals of Red Bull X-Fighters have been cleaned up and upgraded to some extent for the Xbox although some telltale signs of the game's roots still stand out. The geometry of the levels is overly basic and the textures just aren't as sharp as they should be. The graphics aren't altogether horrible, they're just not to the standard that you'd expect for an Xbox Live Arcade game in 2011. The camera remains mostly static, as it should for the two dimensional plane you're driving across but there are times when it tries to get smart and moves to highlight what you're doing and this never works out well. When it moves behind the bike it becomes difficult to judge how far your front wheel is from the ground and when performing stunts it gets near impossible to tell how much time you have until you reach the ground. For a game with less than stellar visuals, sacrificing the gameplay to show closeups and other shots of the rider and bike makes no sense at all.
Red Bull X-Fighters has elements of it that are enjoyable, such as trying to beat your previous time for a race but as it can often be very frustrating to fail to beat your previous time without any obvious clue as to what you did wrong. As a free promotional game Red Bull X-Fighters could be excusable, perhaps even good. As it stands however, there aren't enough redeeming features and fun to warrant a price of $10.