When it comes to ambition, it's impossible to fault Ride 2. It seeks to combine the thrill of riding a motorbike--that sense of exhilarating exposure that comes from hurtling across tarmac without the insulation inherent to sitting in a car--with the form and depth of the likes of Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport.
It's an admirable goal, an attempt to give bike lovers the same kind of exhaustive outing that car nuts have been spoilt with for years. And considering developer Milestone had the original Ride to gain experience and test the design philosophy, it's more than reasonable to expect this sequel to offer something slick and highly tuned.
Unfortunately, that isn't the case. Ride 2 stutters at first gear and that awkward first spin off the line plagues the rest of the journey.
One of the great achievements of both Forza and Gran Turismo is that they instil a sense of aspiration among their players. We want to move through the ranks, to earn cash and unlock new vehicles. These games tempt us to learn new skills and put them to the test across new tracks and against more accomplished opponents, online and off. This aspirational drive provides the motivation for self-improvement and when we're rewarded for achieving as much we feel good about ourselves. The cycle of effort, reward, and satisfaction is in place.
Ride 2 offers only the effort portion of this cycle thanks to a series of mishaps that consistently undermine your time spent with it. A uninteresting presentation results in muted enjoyment at every turn, the in-game financial model forces you to grind through your career in the most restrictive, stilted manner possible, and despite the huge number of available bikes it doesn't take long for a sense of repetition to rise to the surface.
Individually, none of Ride 2's problems are drastic enough to be game breakers. In unison, however, their collective impact is impossible to overlook.
The in-helmet camera is just one example of an admirable goal being poorly executed. Racing from this perspective is fine when you're travelling in a straight line, but as soon as you make even the slightest attempt to turn your entire view is warped in such a way as to create an unwelcome and unforgivable disconnect between what your brain expects and what your eyes are telling it.
Your helmet stays static and straight, even as your bike--visible at the bottom of the screen--leans into and out of corners. This has the effect of making it feel as though you, as the rider, exist in a completely separate space to your bike and you soon develop a distrust of the visuals as a means to communicate whether you should be heavier or lighter on the analogue stick. Not ideal for a game with simulation ambitions.
World Tour is where most of the single player content is stored, its combination of events and challenges tied into a system of earning money in order to upgrade and purchase new bikes. It's a straightforward affair of the kind that has been seen many times before, but it's the way its finer points work (or don't) that prevents it from satisfying.
Upon completing the game's initial tutorial you're asked to choose your first bike from a small selection of different kinds, from dirt to road bikes. From there you move on to choose which event you're going to enter as the first of your career, but there's no indication as to what your selected bike is eligible for until you're deep into the multitude of menu layers.
Couple this with an excessive number of loading screens and you're left with an initial user experience that does everything to convince you to stop playing before you've even started to compete. The dreadful voiceover that plays over the World Tour intro video offers little in the way of charm, either, as does the soulless shop housing new bikes.
Individually, none of Ride 2's problems are drastic enough to be game breakers. In unison, however, their collective impact is impossible to overlook.
Acquiring new bikes is essential to progression and engaging in the potential for diversity that such a broad range of vehicles allows. The problem here is that new bikes are not cheap in comparison to earnings for winning races, and your initial hardware doesn't keep up with the competition for long. As such, you soon find yourself racing like a menace in order to give yourself a chance at a podium finish and lining your bank account with enough coin to give yourself a sporting chance.
Simply, the fact that you can race so angrily and aggressively works to undermine the core structure of Ride 2 and its attempts at being the real riding simulator. Cutting off opponents to slow them down, purposefully hitting into them when entering corners and using them as a tool to improve braking all works once you've grasped the physics model. Of course, you don't have to engage in any of this but its mere existence is enough to break your suspension of disbelief and cause you to question whether you're playing an arcade game in simulator clothing.
When you're out in front and given free track to race through things do feel energetic in a realistic, interesting way, and you're motivated to improve your skills. As soon as you're surrounded by competitors, though, the experience devolves into something closer to stock car racing.
You can earn greater financial rewards by increasing the difficulty, but ramping up the AI to its most challenging setting equates to only a five per cent boost in earnings. It's tempting to simply compete against opponents on 'Very Easy' in order to quickly gain enough financial power to buy the kinds of equipment suitable for the tasks levelled at you. Thereafter you can stop worrying about money and race on the difficulty that's right for you.
But this turns Ride 2 into an exercise of grinding through the easiest and least interesting of races until you reach that tipping point whereby you can begin to play as you always intended. The financial formulas underpinning World Tour need serious attention in order to work properly and allow for the kind of personalised approach that other games using this sort of career progression allow for.
Multiplayer is more engaging in that you can bypass those elements that force you to grind your way to a healthy bank account and lock you into a repetitive structure. Here Ride 2 shines slightly brighter, but proceedings only ever reach mediocre entertainment thanks to a physics engine that is not realistic enough to pass for a simulation and not filled with enough simple joy to be an arcade experience. As such you never feel totally convinced that you should dedicate yourself to racing as you would in reality or whether you should be pushing to achieve crazy, impossible feats. This lack of definition is not welcome in the competitive world of online racing.
Just as you try to focus yourself online to one playstyle or the other, you're either thrown off your bike due to being knocked into during a corner turn or you finish last thanks to being too diligent and professional by making sure you avoid contact altogether. At every corner you're reminded that this is a game that doesn't really know how to refine the details of the avalanche of content it offers in the form of tracks and bikes.
Simply, Ride 2 doesn't make a convincing case for more motorcycle games to be produced. Yes, it is a genre that is underrepresented in comparison to its car-based siblings, but the level of expected quality across racing games as a whole is so high that anything other than an outstanding release is impossible to recommend.
On paper, then, Ride 2 is an exciting proposition that bundles the promises of aspirational game design with the raw power and fun associated with motorbikes. Unfortunately, those promises are broken and the resulting game falls flat. Unless you're so enamoured with two-wheeled machines that you simply can't help but pick yourself up a copy, you should wait for a new contender to try its hand at delivering a biking game of this scope.
