Trials HD, for Xbox 360
developed by RedLynx for Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade
ESRB rating: T.
by Wade Manns
Trials HD doesn’t really have a story, but at its soul is competition. You compete with your friends that you’ve added through Xbox Live, as well as the thousands-strong whole of the Xbox Live community. Your goal is to ride motorcycles through over 50 special tracks in several different modes.
What elevates that somewhat mundane concept to elegance is the game’s extreme reliance on physics and the reactions of the bike to the terrain around it. You accelerate and brake using the right or left triggers, and adjusting your weight forwards or backwards on the bike is as simple as tilting the left stick left or right slightly, and you will need this fine control to get past the majority of the game’s puzzles. A wrong adjustment at a wrong time, or the right adjustment at the wrong time can lead to disaster as your biker either plummets off a high precipice or simply splashes down on the course and is flattened by your bike.
Fortunately, the game isn’t really as gory as it sounds, thanks to the game’s T rating. There are rather detailed ragdoll physics (meaning that the game uses a detailed simulation for determining how the biker reacts to surfaces around him) for the game, but they are used in a somewhat cartoonish manner and are thus not very realistic. The game gets its T rating from the various contextual (and sometimes lewd) comments made by the members of the comedy troupe that produced MTV’s Jackass, including Bam Margera and Johnny Knoxville, as you bail in spectacular ways or accomplish a particularly difficult stunt.
As well as the straightforward courses, there are also special challenges that require you to balance your bike inside a sphere as it rolls down the course, “ski-jump” your bike off an incline and bail out so as to fling your biker as far as you can, and many more varied challenges. Your progress is gauged in real time against your friends who play the game also, and just like all the other Xbox Live games, there are leaderboards so that you can check your progress and high score against those of players from all over the world.
If you ever feel like being frustrated by a game, but also feel a strong sense of accomplishment when you complete certain goals in said game, Trials HD is for you. For this particular genre of game if you’re really into that kind of thing, I’d give it a five out of five. If you’re not really into this particular type of game or you find yourself easily frustrated, I would give it a three out of five, but still recommend that you try it, because it is quite good.