Trials HD

Trials HD

Trials HD is a game that’s less concerned with obeying the laws of physics as flaunting them. Astride a 125cc dirt bike you’ll find yourself cart-wheeling 50 feet into the air off a steep ledge, loop-de-looping around giant wooden half pipes and careering over ravines packed with enough pyrotechnics to take your leg off. It’s vivid, spectacular, at times brutally unforgiving but always absolutely brilliant stuff.

It’s also wonderfully simple to pick up and play, although, as with all the very best videogames, mastery is a hard won thing. You have a throttle, a brake and the ability to shift your rider’s weight forwards and backwards on the bike. Using these three inputs you can teeter along balance beams, shoot up near-vertical ramps and carefully angle your front wheel to the correct pitch in order to land perilous drops.

But while the game rewards great precision it also requires speed. There are no immediate competitors in the game, no AI riders to race. But, connect to Xbox Live and all of your friends who own the game are imported, info flashes on the HUD indicating how far ahead or behind your closest rival you are at any given moment. It’s an ingenious system that forces you to go back and try and retry every course till you’ve bested your rivals.

The ability to quickly repeat a course or section is the key to keeping the pace of the game high. By pressing the Y button after a fall you’ll immediately return to the most recent checkpoint, while the back button can be hit at any moment to restart the level. There’s no loading to interrupt the flow of play, thus the game encourages multiple reattempts. The relatively short length of the game’s fifty courses also helps to keep the tempo of play up, while the game’s structure teaches the various techniques in an elegant and well-pitched difficulty curve.

While the graphics are presented in good-looking, full 3D, the mechanics are essentially 2D, the bike always moving from left to right and never into the screen. Fans of the PC versions of Trials may bemoan the reduced number of game modes but this cutback has paid for a tighter focus and more considered execution to the main attraction. As a score attack game between friends on Xbox Live, Trials HD is destined to become the new Geometry Wars 2, a download game of rare excellence whose bite-size levels can be guzzled or savoured.

5 out of 5