![]() ![]() Sometimes it even happens just as I cross the finish line. Sometimes it happens in the middle of a race. Sometimes it happens while I’m exploring. I can’t count the number of times in roughly 15 hours of play that a hard spill made me laugh out loud in a way video games usually don’t. You can also tap a button to rewind a few seconds at any time.Ī more hardcore extreme sports sim might’ve punished players for failure, but Riders Republic takes the enlightened stance that failure is funny and therefore good. Just rapidly tap a button a few times and you’ll be right back up, often without even losing position in a race. In a stroke of genius, crashing horribly in a way that would be fatal to a real person comes with no stakes at all. While Riders Republic’s progression is fun enough on its own (downhill bike races are particularly thrilling), the real joy of this game that Ubisoft buried behind Far Cry 6 in the release schedule is its gloriously stupid physics engine. It’ll only take another hour after the tutorial to unlock the jetpack, which means you can fly around the Republic with zero restrictions whatsoever. Once you’re done with the mercifully short and reasonably effective tutorial, you’re set free in this national park dreamscape to participate in events, earn stars from them to unlock even more events, and generally goof around in a gorgeous open world that’s not interested in gatekeeping the player from any part of it. Nothing that anyone says here matters at all. Feel free to just mute the game and listen to a podcast or something. This is by several orders of magnitude the worst part of Riders Republic. The Republic appears to be governed by a sort of Burning Man festival for extreme sports, and you’ll spend the first hour or so being tutorialized by a series of somewhat annoying dopes who say things like “holy shiz whizzle” while teaching you how to do snowboard tricks. Riders Republic puts you in the shoes of a custom character who’s new on the scene in the titular Republic, a massive open world (opens in a new tab) made up of landmarks from a handful of real national parks from around the U.S., like Bryce Canyon and Yosemite. ![]() It’s really about the joys of going way too fast and crashing so hard that the game’s physics don’t know what to do with your flailing idiot body. This is ostensibly a game about winning races and trick competitions on bikes, skis, snowboards, as well as in wingsuits and jetpacks, but let's be real: Winning is for losers. That combination of awe at the raw beauty of our national parks, adrenaline from doing things that would disintegrate a human body in real life, and the pure comedy of extreme sports slapstick is the secret sauce that makes Ubisoft’s Riders Republic one of 2021’s best hidden gems. In these unprecedented times, sometimes it’s therapeutic to blast up into the skies above some of America’s natural wonders with a jetpack, magically switch to a pizza delivery bike, and plummet to the Earth below. ![]()
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