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• #RIDERS REPUBLIC RELEASE TIME FREE#

The main character that talks to you is some old extreme sports head who has a food truck at the game’s central hub, and he is so annoying. Thankfully you can skip most of it, but not all. Riders Republic’s idea of extreme sports culture is Red Bull, Sobe Life Water, and people who still earnestly say “that’s the shiznit.” Every time the game talks, I want to do anything else. Once you escape the confines of that hellish hub, maybe you’ll have time to explore the world or do some races before the game chooses to talk at you, the player, and that is really where everything falls apart.

#RIDERS REPUBLIC RELEASE TIME FREE#

There is a central hub where you can manage your sponsors (avenues for challenges/ways to spend the free in-game currency), buy and equip new gear (using free or paid currencies), learn new tricks at a tricks hub, or just generally brush shoulders with fellow players such as XxXFreeHeadshotsXxX or ZzKingBalls443zZ. But the game will do its best to always get in your way, to break that bliss with a new tutorial, explanation of a new currency or progression meter, or to cheesily introduce some new limited-time race or weekly challenge. Thus, funnily enough, Riders Republic feels pretty isolating-just your player avatar, your extreme sport of choice, and nature. But are you going to do that? Be honest, are you? Riders Republic is 75% “kind of.” It wants to be a connected experience but half the time other player avatars are delineated as little human-shaped graphics, and even when you brush up with a fellow player, you’ll just clip through them. It is a competitive online sports game-kind of. So what about everything else? Buddy, oh wow, it is bad, bad, bad. Okay, so the game is fun and the sports all feel great.

Too bad the rest of the game is a lukewarm buffet of Ubisoft’s worst tendencies blended into one experience that flips from bliss to frustration about every 10-to-15 minutes.

Each sport feels wonderful to engage with and unique enough that it doesn’t all blur together. Seeing as it is a game that features jetpack racing, I’ve just opted into the arcadey approach. The difficulty options are varied so it can be as arcadey or as sim-lite as you’d like it to be. And thankfully, Riders Republic feels amazing to play. You can switch your sport at any time and races often ask you to flip through multiple sports all in one race. The featured sports are mountain biking, trick biking, skiing, snowboarding, wingsuiting, and jetsuiting. Like the Forza: Horizon series, it does nothing with the fact that it seems like hundreds of thousands of energy drinked-out people with death wishes have just descended upon nature itself, for better and worse. Riders Republic is a game about an extreme sports utopia that features a vast open-world collage of various mountain ranges, valleys, snow parks, and vistas. But it is also more than that, and just remember, this is a review. Riders Republic understands the progressive changes to extreme sports culture, while they don’t do anything with it and only handle it at face value (even the THPS remaster did this better), but fails to understand anything else about extreme sports culture. Extreme sports are less and less havens for straight white dudes and more so communities for all individuals-like all things, there are outliers and it is still a work in progress, but change is happening. Your favorite early-2000s pros are probably sober and promoting wellness, meditation, and healthy culinary lifestyles. The extreme sports of today are, minus the sports themselves, actively pretty chill. You had to do it without a parachute and it, of course, had to be an ad for an energy drink. Two backflips and a 900-degree spin were what the people wanted, so the pros risked their lives and delivered. A backflip on a dirt bike wasn’t enough, neither was a 720 degree spin on a skateboard. Grinding a rail wasn’t enough, you had to throw yourself down a twenty stair rail lest you be ridiculed. Skate videos featured fistfights, nudity, bone-chilling bail sections, rampant substance abuse, and more. I started skateboarding in the early 2000s, an era where extreme sports were extreme to a fault.

This is a review for Riders Republic, don’t forget that. They continue to also release tone-deaf games, culturally insensitive works, and games like Riders Republic that oscillate between bliss and blood-boiling ruination. And also, do not forget or shy away from the fact that Ubisoft has yet to fundamentally handle the toxicity, sexism, and rampant issues within their workplace.