As long as you finish, the game will give you your star and move on. You don’t need to meet any requirements, place in a certain position, or finish within a certain time. In order to complete an event, you only need to reach the finish line. The game also makes a very strange balancing decision. It comes across as laziness on the developers’ part more than anything else, like them saying, “Yeah we don’t know where the fun is, you guys can figure that out” as if their job isn’t to create a tight, cohesive game with only fun elements. Most discussions around this game praise the freedom the game gives you, but all of that “freedom” means that yes, while you can do whatever you want, all of the things you don’t want to do take up equal time and space in the game. It makes essentially no effort to avoid the countless pitfalls people have pointed out in Ubisoft open worlds for years. I could go on for pages about every little thing in the game that doesn’t need, but the most succinct explanation is just that it is a Ubisoft open-world game, no more, no less. This points to a much larger issue that the game has with simply having too much. I had no motivation to explore the world and could essentially fast travel anywhere immediately, so I had to ask the question of “why does the game even have an open world?” If the open world enhances the game in absolutely zero ways, then it only serves to get in the way of the actual fun part of the game: the gameplay. See, Ubisoft made the game, which means that the game has a giant open world with hundreds of random collectibles scattered throughout that give you absolutely nothing of value. While the gameplay is great, unfortunately, the game starts to lose itself with everything else. I couldn’t find any reliable way to input an exact trick, which essentially just reduced trick events to arbitrary button mashing. Even if you very clearly input an angled spin on the right stick, the game might just decide to do something else. With the default controls though, when you spin in tricks, you can either do flips, normal spins, or angled spins like a corkscrew or a misty, but the controls just don’t exactly respond to what you input.

Of course, the game does actually let you use Steep controls, but the controls are awful on the bike, which shares the control scheme, and constantly switching control schemes in the menus just doesn’t make sense. The snow sports focus much more on tricks, and as I alluded to before, the trick controls aren’t bad, but they’re definitely not as good as Steep. Control-wise, they feel a little less tight, but the biggest issue comes in the tricks. Shortly after the bike, the game hands you the snowboard and skis, which also feel great, but not quite as great. The bike is designed for speed and you can tell that a well-versed racing game team designed the mechanic because the bike responds well to input, the steering and drifting feel great, and the tricks look fantastic (though I have some gripes with the tricks that we’ll get into soon). Let it be known that the gameplay in Riders Republic, especially the biking, is downright exceptional. Most of the bike events are races, and even the trick ones (which you don’t unlock until later) are very speed-based, and it works well.

Perhaps I should have known though because the game starts you out on the mountain bike, a new feature, not from Steep. This created a good deal of friction for me, as I expected a more standard extreme sports game in the vein of Steep or Skate 3, so when I found myself playing more racing challenges than trick challenges, I struggled to get into it initially. Almost half of the game’s challenges are trick-based, and the game has a point system for tricks, but the game centers itself around speed and racing competitions. This is because Riders Republic is, perhaps counter to what you would expect, a social racing game above all else.

Rider republic glitch