Trials Fusion’s best tracks sit behind a paywall, 12 years on

Trials Fusion asks a lot of your thumbs and almost nothing of your patience. Ubisoft RedLynx built a physics toy in April 2014 — a motorcycle, a ramp, a rider you nudge forward and back with the left stick — and then spent an entire game finding new ways to punish anyone who gets cocky. It came to PlayStation 4, PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, and it is the first Trials game to land on a PlayStation platform at all. That history matters less than the riding does. What matters is whether the fifth entry in the series still has a reason to exist beyond a prettier backdrop and a quad bike.

Trailer, via GameSpot.

The Rider, the Ramp, and the Year 2042

Trials Fusion is an arcade take on observed trials, the real sport where riders pick their way through obstacles without putting a foot down. The game keeps that idea and throws out the restraint. You control a rider on a physics-based motorcycle from the start of a level to the end, and the courses are obstacle-laden and ramp-ridden in the way the marketing promised. The camera sits to the side. The world is rendered in 3D, but you only ever move forward and backward on a 2D plane.

That single constraint is the whole design. Every input is weight: shift the rider forward for a wheelie, back for a stoppie, tilt in the air for a flip, and then choose how the bike lands. Get the landing wrong and you eat dirt. Get it right and the run keeps its rhythm, which is the only rhythm this game has ever cared about.

The setting is a costume, and it knows it. Trials Fusion takes place in 2042, after an object fell from the sky and changed our world, and after something called the Anomaly AI came into being. Two characters descended from that AI, SynDI and George, speak to your rider — named Rider — as disembodied voices across the game. The UN has also marked off parts of the planet as United Nations Ungoverned Regions. None of it changes a jump. It does give the tracks a futuristic sheen, and that sheen is one of the things the game does well.

The Quad Bike and the Rest of the Garage

The new toys are the point of a sequel, and Trials Fusion has a modest pile of them. Freestyle motocross stunts arrive for the first time in the series: move the right analog stick in the air and the rider throws something beyond a flip. The bigger addition is vehicle choice. A handful of levels let you take a quad bike, the TKO Panda, instead of two wheels.

The rest of the garage is a roster of motorbikes — Baggie, Roach, Pit Viper and Foxbat — plus the minibike Donkey, a cat riding the Unicorn MK II, and a BMX bike called Rabbit. These are not skins. They handle differently, and the levels built around them are where the game stops being another Trials course pack and starts being its own thing.

Then there is the create mode, a track editor that lets players build their own courses and games. It is the deepest system in Trials Fusion and the one the game explains least. That gap is real, and it costs the package.

Eight Riders, Four on Xbox 360

Multiplayer splits cleanly by platform. On PS4, Xbox One and PC, up to eight players race across different tracks. On Xbox 360, the cap is four. Online multiplayer did not ship with the disc — it arrived in an update on January 24, 2015, roughly nine months after launch.

That delay is worth naming plainly. A game sold on the promise that competition is always around you launched without the mode that made the promise literal, and early buyers spent most of a year racing ghosts and leaderboards instead. The single-player campaign and the local play carried the weight, and the track records against the best Trials players around the globe were always there. But the global tournament arrived late.

Six Packs, One Companion Game, 1.7 Million Units

Ubisoft supported Trials Fusion for a long stretch. Six paid DLC packs came out, alongside several free content updates. A companion game, Trials Frontier, shipped for iOS and Android, designed to sit alongside the console and PC title rather than replace it.

The commercial result was solid. By February 2015, Trials Fusion had sold over 1.7 million units. For a series that had never touched a PlayStation platform before, that number is the story of the release: the audience followed the bikes to new hardware.

The critical reception matched it. Trials Fusion was generally well received, with praise landing on the level design, the controls, the graphics, the futuristic setting and the sheer amount of content. The complaints were narrower but consistent: no proper tutorials for the create mode, and too much of the game feeling like the Trials games that came before it.

Where Trials Fusion Actually Stands

Start with what the game gets right, because the list is long and it is not nostalgia. The controls are the best argument for the series existing. Weight-shifting a physics bike through a ramp-ridden course is a mechanic with no real competition, and Trials Fusion executes it cleanly enough that a bad run always feels like your fault. That is the mark of a control scheme worth mastering.

The difficulty is the other strength, and it is not a bug to be managed. Trials Fusion is notorious for it, particularly toward the end of the game, and that reputation is earned. The late levels ask for precision that the early levels only hint at, and the curve from a clean beginner track to a run that takes fifty attempts is steep on purpose. The game respects you enough to let you fail.

The futuristic setting does more work than it should have to. A 2042 backdrop with a fallen object, an Anomaly AI and two disembodied voices named SynDI and George is thin material for a narrative, and the game never tries to make it more than that. But it gives the tracks a look — clean, bright, a little unreal — that separates Trials Fusion from the muddier industrial courses of its predecessors. The United Nations Ungoverned Regions are set dressing. The set dressing is good.

Now the problems, ranked by how much they matter:

1. The create mode tutorial gap. A track editor this deep with this little instruction wastes the best tool in the game. Players who push through it get a platform for making their own courses and games. Players who do not will never see it.
2. The familiarity problem. Trials Fusion is the fifth game in the series, and large stretches of it are the fourth game with better lighting. The quad bike, the freestyle stunts and the new bikes are real additions, but they are additions to a formula that was already set.
3. The late multiplayer. Adding online play on January 24, 2015 is better than never, but it means the game’s first nine months were a different product than the one it became.
4. The Xbox 360 ceiling. Four players against eight on every other platform is a real gap for anyone still on the older console.

None of these are fatal. The first is the one that stings, because the create mode is where a five-game-old series finds its future, and Trials Fusion hides it behind a wall of guesswork.

The Verdict on the Fifth Trials

Weigh it against what came before and the decision is straightforward. Trials Fusion is the most polished Trials game and the least surprising one. It refines the physics, adds a quad and a stunt stick, wraps the whole thing in a 2042 skin that looks better than it reads, and ships a track editor it barely explains.

The 1.7 million units sold by February 2015 say the audience was happy to follow the series onto PlayStation hardware for the first time. The critical consensus — good level design, good controls, good graphics, too familiar, too little help in create mode — is the right read.

The part worth watching is not the campaign. It is the editor, and whether a future Trials game trusts players with it from the start instead of making them earn the manual. Trials Fusion is a strong ride with a locked door in the middle of it. That is a 7.9 out of 10.

game review · physics game · PS4 · Trials Fusion · Ubisoft RedLynx · Xbox One