Trials HD Review

Simple idea? Check. Addictive gameplay? Check. Infuriating levels, that you know you can beat but find yourself repeating over and over until you finally get past it? Check. You could say that Trials HD really has it all when it comes to the crunch for a casual game.

The game play is excellent, surpassing that of RedLynx's earlier outing with "Trials 2: Second Edition". Everything just seems to have been polished to a fine sheen, oozing class from every pore like Golden Syrup direct from the tin. If there's one complaint to be had about Trials HD, is that it's mostly short. It's easily played through in just a few hours if you're in any way proficient with the controls.

Mostly short, in that you'll get to the last 4 levels, and wonder if you're ever going to finish the game at all. It's this wickedly steep learning curve that has you playing the same track over and over, until you nail the technique needed to pass certain obstacles. Herein lies the tricky part. You're only allowed 30 minutes on any one track to get through, and you're only allowed 500 retires on the same track. This might sound like a lot or time and retries, but try telling yourself that as you near the final point of the last track in the game, with 29 minutes on the clock and 468 retries under your belt. To say that moment wasn't frantic would be an understatement at best.

There's also a bunch of fantastically fun skill games to be had, in which you have to do varying displays of motorbiking dexterity that can either lead to an epic display of determination, or an equally epic demonstration of how badly you can injure your rider using nothing more than a ramp, a few storage containers, and the ability to bailout of your bike by pressing Y.

Unfortunately, this cloud is missing a small part of its silver lining, there's not a single jot of multiplayer in the game, less for having your friends relative position on the track in a small bar at the top, and regarding the skill games, their times/distances/scores are displayed as markers on the track. That's as far as multiplayer goes, which is a shame. This leads to the track editor, which is a wonderfully powerful editor, and something I could see some brilliant tracks being created from, however, due to technical limitations of Xbox Live, you can only share tracks amongst your friends and only if you're the creator. Not a huge disadvantage, given what will probably be the least used part of the game.

The Tournaments in game have become the discussion of one of the hardest achievements to grace an XBLA game. The last in the list pits you against 24 of the games tracks, one after the other, and in order to obtain said final achievement of the game, you need to do it... without ANY errors. We'll leave that one up to you to achieve.

Overall, the game is excellent and definitely the best of the titles that appeared during the "Summer of Arcade" promotion. It's nice to see smaller developers appearing on the consoles for games like this, given they started life as a small Flash based game on the Internet. When the content is this good, that it can make some of the larger developers games look rushed and messy. I, for one, am hoping to see more RedLynx games appearing on the Xbox Live Marketplace.