I have never been so happy with Riders Republic.
Let’s just say that Riders Republic is fun . It’s great fun. It’s a blast to ride downhill on a snowboard at a high speed and then switch to a jetpack or wingsuit to take off. Then, you can nosedive into trees to scare another player. Although I have only had a few hours of the game, it is so fun that I can see myself spending many more.
Ubisoft’s Downhill Sandbox/Playground has a lot to offer. There are many events and activities to choose from, including skiing, snowboarding and mountain biking. You can have so much fun with the toys. Many of the events are designed to maximize the fun factor, such as switching between disciplines in GTA Online’s Transform Races.
It’s simple: it’s wrapped in fake, cringey crap. You can easily dismiss the idea that Riders Republic has a story or premise. And given the fact that Riders Republic features a lot of characters talking during cutscenes and Ubisoft’s amazing job at making dialogue as short as possible, it’s easy for people to overlook this. This is embarrassing for all involved.
Riders Republic is trying to justify its sandbox with a loose premise for their antics. In essence, some Gen Z/hipster millennial tosspots decided (in my opinion) to secede from America to create their own country. One that allows them to “totally shred” the United States and be “wicked grarly” or something. While that’s all well and good, it seems like everyone who engages in any kind of dialogue is a weapons-grade loser who answers phone calls with the insulting “CIAO FOR NOW”
The soundtrack isn’t helping either. However, it earns brownie points for featuring The Offspring’s “All I Want” on the playlist. This fills a Crazy Taxi-shaped gap in my life that Taxi chaos didn’t fill earlier this year. All that goodwill was ruined by a folk cover of Gangsta’s Paradise. Nothing says excitement like making a classic rap song super sad. To complete the sad-boy mixtape, they could have added Piano Man’s cover of Hurt and Johnny Cash’s.
It’s a little bit petty to get so focused on the audio/visual presentation in a game that allows you to slam headfirst into trees like the uncool George of The Jungle. But it’s so terrible. It seems like a group of middle-aged writers trying to imitate what gamers find cool. But it just keeps getting stronger. After around half an hour, you can only take one action: mute all music and put your own music on.
This is a problem for racing games that aim to show a group of people gathering at a particular location. Forza Horizon follows a similar pattern. FH characters aren’t a leap up from Riders Republic’s sloppy characters, but Forza Horizon’s greatest fault is the characters. Instead of being overpowering digital douchebags, they are bland mouthpieces that blend in the background.
Riders Republic is a game that feels like Sunset Overdrive today, despite the fact they share some gameplay similarities. Both titles have a lot of fun gameplay, but if you don’t stop playing, it will be hard to get the remote control to mute. Sunset Overdrive did have a few decent jokes. Reset the clock. It’s been zero days since Sunset Overdrive was mentioned.
However, I want to emphasize that Riders Republic’s different disciplines are a lot of fun. Amazing graphics and the wingsuit/jetpack combination make exploration feel more freeing than other open-world games. The entire game’s presentation is so annoying that it makes me want needles in my ears. Riders Republic could be described as being as brash as its gameplay, but the gameplay should have spoken for itself, rather than being drowned out with inane, uninteresting rubbish.
Ubisoft has been doing this for the past few years. Legion and Watch Dogs 2 tried so hard to get down with the children, and titles like Roller Champions, Hyper Scape, and the upcoming XDefiant, as well as the Ghost Recon: Frontline showed Ubisoft’s blatant desire either to chase a trend, or to try to be cool. Riders Republic, if nothing else, is yet another example of Ubisoft’s ineptness in trying to be cool.
