Trials Evolution turns a motorcycle into a physics problem, and the answer is usually a crash. RedLynx built a game about moving forward on a 2D plane while the world around you is rendered in three dimensions, and that single contradiction is the whole appeal. It came out on Xbox Live Arcade on April 18, 2012, and later on PC. It is the follow-up to Trials HD, the 2009 game that made this studio’s name.
Trailer, via Ubisoft.
A Rider Who Can Only Go Forward and Back
The setup is simple. You control a rider on a physics-based motorcycle and move from the start of a level to the end. Obstacles sit in the way. The goal is to finish as fast as possible with as few crashes as possible. The game calls those crashes faults. That is the entire loop, and Trials Evolution never pretends otherwise.
What makes it work is the control scheme. The rider can only move forwards and backwards on a 2D plane. You can adjust the bike’s pitch on the ground or while in the air. Those are the only verbs. The game uses 3D graphics, but you never steer left or right in any meaningful sense. Your whole relationship with the world is throttle, brake and lean.
That sounds like a limitation. It is the design. RedLynx gets an enormous amount of range out of a control set you could explain in a sentence, and the game’s own pitch for it is “Easy to learn, hard to master.” That phrase gets thrown around constantly in this medium. Here it holds up.
Fifty Tracks and a Curve in the Line
Trials Evolution ships with 50 single player tracks. The tracks are where the difficulty lives, and the difficulty is not really about speed. It is about precision. High-level players lean on very particular micro-adjustment techniques to clear tracks of extreme difficulty. Watch someone good at this game and the inputs look less like driving and more like tuning an instrument by hand.
The sequel adds one structural change that matters more than it sounds. The line of movement can now curve. Controls stay the same, but the map and the driving line can swerve. That gives track designers room for more creative and more challenging maps, and it is the main reason Trials Evolution feels like a different game from its predecessor rather than a bigger one.
Compare the two and the shift is clear:
| Feature | Trials HD (2009) | Trials Evolution (2012) |
|---|---|---|
| Movement line | Straight | Can curve |
| Platforms | Xbox 360 | Xbox 360, PC (Microsoft Windows) |
| Track editor | Included | Included |
| Multiplayer | Limited | Up to four players, same console or Xbox LIVE |
| Bundled release | — | Gold Edition (2013) included Trials HD |
That last row is worth noting for anyone buying late. In 2013, Trials Evolution was released as Trials Evolution: Gold Edition, which bundled a copy of Trials HD with it.
Four Players, Ghost Bikes and Swerving Tracks
Evolution allows up to four players to compete at once, either on the same console or over Xbox LIVE. The game handles this two ways. Specialized tracks let four players ride alongside one another, in the manner of Nintendo’s Excitebike. On other tracks, players compete in-line, and your friends show up as ghost bikes on the course.
The distinction matters. Side-by-side racing is a party mode. In-line racing with ghosts is a time trial with social pressure attached, and it suits the game better. Trials is not a game about bumping other riders off a line. It is a game about your own inputs, and the ghost format keeps that focus while still giving you someone to lose to.
What the Money Buys and What the Stats Show
Single player progression pays out money, and that money goes toward customizing your rider and motorcycle’s appearance. The game tracks several statistics, and it lets you compare them with Xbox Live friends. The tracked figures include:
- Medals earned
- Money earned
- Other stats
Leaderboards are also included. None of this is novel. All of it is functional, and the leaderboards in particular do real work for a game built on shaving tenths of a second off a run.
An Editor That Turns Players Into Designers
On every platform, Trials Evolution includes a course editor that lets users create their own scenarios. This is not a side feature. It is the reason the game had a life beyond its launch window, and it is the reason the curving driving line matters so much.
The editor inherits directly from Trials HD, which had one too. Evolution’s version benefits from the new movement system, and the result is a toolset that lets players build things the shipped tracks only hint at. When a game hands its community the same tools its developers used, the ceiling on content stops being the 50 tracks in the box.
The trade-off is that the editor is not friendly. It rewards the same temperament the main game does: patience, iteration, and a tolerance for failing the same thing forty times.
The Gold Edition and the Late Buyer
In 2013, Trials Evolution was reissued as Trials Evolution: Gold Edition, and that version bundled a copy of Trials HD alongside the sequel. For anyone arriving after the fact, it is the straightforward purchase. You get both games in one place instead of paying twice for a lineage you can now buy in a single package.
The catch is that the bundle does nothing for people who already owned Trials HD. If you bought the 2009 game, the Gold Edition asks you to pay again for something already sitting in your library. That is not a knock on the game. It is just the shape of the deal.
Where Trials Evolution Actually Stands
Trials Evolution is a sequel that improves on its predecessor in exactly one structural way and then gets out of the way. The curving line is the whole argument. Everything else — the money, the customization, the stats, the leaderboards — is furniture around a core that RedLynx had already nailed in 2009.
That is not a complaint. The core is excellent. A physics game lives or dies on whether its failures feel like your fault, and Trials Evolution passes that test completely. When you flip a bike on a ramp you have cleared a hundred times, you know precisely which input you got wrong. That is a rare and valuable thing in a game about momentum.
The multiplayer is the weaker half. Four-player simultaneous racing is fun in short bursts, but the ghost-bike format is the one that lasts, and it lasts because it is basically single player with an audience. The side-by-side tracks, modeled on Excitebike, are a nod to history that the rest of the game has already moved past.
The course editor is the part worth watching. It is the difference between a game you finish and a game you keep. RedLynx shipped 50 tracks and then shipped the means to make thousands more, and the community did the rest. Any studio planning a sequel to a physics game should study that decision.
What holds Trials Evolution back from being more than very good is that it never quite escapes its own premise. The controls are deliberately narrow, and the game is honest about that, but narrow controls mean narrow expression. There is a ceiling on how differently two players can approach the same track, and the game hits it. The satisfaction is real; the surprise is limited.
Still, this is one of the better arcade releases of its era, and it earns its reputation on execution rather than novelty. It knows exactly what it is, it does that thing at a high level, and it hands players the tools to push past what the developers built. That combination is rarer than it should be.
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