Even if it doesn’t carry the same branding, Riders Republic is a clear successor to Ubisoft’s extreme sports title Steep with mountain bikes added in for good measure. Many of the other additions were tested out as Steep DLC first and while that means Riders Republic doesn’t have many original ideas (like, say, inline skating to flesh out the land challenges), the test run allowed Ubisoft to get plenty of time to refine the systems and create additional, easy-to-use control schemes. As a result, everything from flying around in a jet-powered wingsuit to skiing down a mountain feels great, but the rest of the experience is grating and generic.
Solid core gameplay is almost expected as Ubisoft doesn’t struggle with the basics. Even the titles on the bland end of the spectrum like Ghost Recon Wildlands are typically are functional from a technical gameplay standpoint. Where they tend to struggle is making events matter and not just presenting players with a to-do list, which unfortunately is the case in Riders Republic.
No matter what career path you pursue (which range from bikes to flying and snow sports), you’ll be sent on a journey of dozens of events that get tired rather quickly. Aside from the 20-plus stunts scattered around the gigantic map, there’s just not a ton of creativity in the events. Sometimes the game will put every skier in a giraffe costume or have you racing at night time, but it’s still a lot of standard checkpoint races that go on for way too long. The mechanics are tight, but not tight enough to withstand the game’s repetitive nature.
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The fact that these races are of the same ilk as the ones seen in Far Cry 6 is a letdown since this open-world filler is side content at best. While the trick system fares a lot better and has a surprising amount of depth, you’re eventually just riding down different mountains and doing the same combos that led to success in the past. There are a few secondary objectives that encourage specific tricks or up the difficulty, but these aren’t enough to redeem the so-so and straightforward design of a vast majority of the events.
Stunt missions have a lot of unique ideas and are surprisingly difficult, given the easy nature of the rest of the game. They’re even relatively diverse, too. Some will have you switching between different sports, such as changing from your bike to a squirrel suit mid-mission, which offers a level of variety that is otherwise never explored. My favorite one was a bicycle stunt challenge that felt like a Trials level where you have to cross narrow areas and make difficult jumps to get through a course. This variety puts the other events into a clearer perspective since it shows that the game can be more unique if it wants and makes those other missions more disappointing by comparison. If there were more stunts to do and a wider range of difficulty to make players develop the skills they need to finish them, then Riders Republic would be a much more interesting game.
But it lacks those interesting moments since they’re spread so thin across such a bloated experience and doesn’t provide a proper amount of satisfaction for its endless grind. The moment that best encapsulated this feeling and Riders Republic as a whole came at the very end the snowboarding and skiing tricks career. After completing over 20 events, the X-Games finally opened up and comprised of three different trick-based events. The event itself was a lot of fun, although not the most difficult trick mission, but after it was over, an underwhelming rush nothingness kicked in after just a silver trophy popped unlocked — not even a gold — and essentially nothing more extravagant.
What should have been my biggest accomplishment was recognized by the same exact results screen I had seen dozens of times before. There was little in terms of celebration, just some new gear and then I was sent back into the world to do more events. This unsatisfying conclusion to my snowboarding career largely made it difficult to want to continue on. The lack of payoff is straight-up demoralizing once you realize the game just wants you to partake in this content loop forever.
There are things to accomplish in Riders Republic, but only so that the progress bar goes up just enough to remind players that they still need to do more events to achieve the next checkmark. It’s the same type of mindset that permanently unhappy people use to mark their own life progression, always striving for the next goal without taking a moment to enjoy what they’ve accomplished, applied to an endless grind of a game. It’s an exhausting design philosophy that treats the players like a great white shark that’ll die as soon as they take a moment to pause and let things sink in.
The world is just as hollow as the progression system. There are some pretty landmarks to discover, such as gigantic redwood trees and canyon formations that are based on actual locales, but these are few and far between. If there isn’t a marker placed in an area telling you to check it out, then it probably doesn’t have any sign of life aside from the occasional rabbit. Unlike Watch Dogs 2‘s memorable depiction of San Francisco that offered a similar reward system for going to specific parts of the world, there’s little joy to be had just existing in the larger landscape; it’s a open space for content and little else.
The map of Riders Republic is more akin to Ubisoft’s The Crew series as it also shrunk real areas into one giant map with major creative liberties and both have many of the same strengths and weaknesses. The map itself makes little geographical sense as it is a hodgepodge of different areas across North America smashed together, but it also rarely takes advantage of the more fantastical elements that could’ve been used to take the game in a more interesting, arcade-like direction.
Annoyingly, some of Riders Republic‘s best moments are when it embraces the ridiculous, as seen in its super-sized skate park that features monsters to grind on. These are few and far between, as the game is largely presented as a realistic locale that is unable to replicate the actual splendor of the outdoors. It has some lovely landscapes, but Ubisoft’s usual creative indecisiveness has caged it into straying away from going too over-the-top with its world.
Anyone that has played Ubisoft’s past decade of output will find much of Riders Republic to be incredibly familiar despite it technically being a new franchise. It does do many things better than its spiritual predecessor, as the controls and user interface are much more welcoming than Steep‘s, but it doesn’t push the extreme sports genre forward or in any interesting directions. Instead, it opts for a relatively safe journey that never fully goes for it and tries to hit the high marks of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater or SSX Tricky yet never fully bails either, which Ubisoft has conditioned players to expect. Riders Republic has plenty of content for players that want to spend countless hours in just one game, but it’s just not much more than a cold experience that’s blatantly designed to be a time-suck.
SCORE: 6/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 6 equates to “Decent.” It fails to reach its full potential and is a run-of-the-mill experience.
