Trials Rising

What it is

Trials Rising continues the long-running motorcycle physics-platformer series developed by RedLynx, tasking players with balancing throttle and body lean to navigate increasingly elaborate obstacle courses without crashing, competing for the fastest time against friends and the wider community. Published by Ubisoft, it released on 26 February 2019 at NZD 32.99, backed by four DLC add-ons and a season pass. Its 1,575-review English corpus sits at a genuinely Mixed 61.8% (974 to 601), and reading through it in depth reveals a corpus that has almost entirely stopped debating the game's core design and instead argues, at length, about what Ubisoft did to the package surrounding it.

The racing itself draws remarkably little dispute

Across dozens of reviews spanning both positive and negative verdicts, criticism of the fundamental racing and platforming is almost entirely absent. "Ubisoft accidentally built an extremely good core gameplay" into the game, writes one reviewer with over 22,000 minutes — roughly 369 hours — logged, a backhanded compliment that nonetheless confirms the racing itself works. Another, describing 30 hours played, states plainly that "the actual gameplay and graphics of Trials Rising are fantastic" before pivoting entirely to complaints about everything wrapped around it. A summary quoting outside critical coverage embedded in one review captures the corpus's dominant framing precisely: "Trials Rising provides more of that 'easy to learn, hard to master' 2.5D racing platforming fun the franchise is known for — but unnecessary lootboxes, bad monetization practices and content locked behind a loathsome grind seriously diminish the overall experience."

A monetisation and access structure reviewers hold Ubisoft responsible for

The corpus's central, dominant complaint is specific and consistently attributed to the publisher rather than the development studio. Reviewers list, in near-identical terms across independent accounts, the same grievances: loot boxes (cosmetic, but still criticised on principle), a season pass, "payed track packs, payed cosmetics," and bikes locked behind premium currency. "As typical, Ubisoft tried to milk their somewhat successful brand," writes one reviewer, a framing echoed directly by another who pleads for developer RedLynx to "get away from Ubisoft... care about the game again."

Beyond monetisation, mandatory Ubisoft Connect integration has caused genuinely serious access problems for some players. One reviewer reports being unable to play the game at all "after changing my Ubisoft account," despite having purchased it through Steam, and describes contacting Ubisoft support only to receive a response "entirely by AI." A separate reviewer states bluntly that "a huge amount of people cannot get this game to start whatsoever due to Ubisoft's insistence that you install their bloatware," explicitly framing this as a failure distinct from the quality of "a phenomenal game" underneath it. A third, more specific technical complaint concerns server-dependent features: ghost racers pulled from the wider community make "every track loading obnoxiously long," according to one reviewer, with those ghosts difficult to fully disable even for players who'd prefer to race without them.

A UX regression noted by longtime fans specifically

Beyond monetisation and access issues, at least one detailed longtime-fan review raises a more specific interface complaint: a new map-based track chooser has replaced "the simple, great lists of the past" games in the series, a change this reviewer — who reports having "played them all and never had a bad thing to say about them" previously — finds confusing and unwelcome relative to established series conventions. That's a useful, specific data point distinguishing genuine design regression from monetisation complaints: even setting aside Ubisoft's business practices entirely, some structural choices in Rising specifically drew criticism from the series' own most dedicated audience.

What the achievement data reveals about the divide between playing and finishing

Trials Rising's achievement completion data is genuinely striking, and worth dwelling on directly. Across 53 tracked achievements, even the single highest-completed sits at just 6.4%, with the majority clustered in low single digits and several bottoming out around 0.1-0.2%. That's an unusually flat, low ceiling compared to almost every other title checked across this entire lane, where even difficult games typically show at least one early, easy achievement clearing 50% or more. Two explanations are worth weighing, and they aren't mutually exclusive. First, the racing itself is genuinely difficult to master, consistent with the "hard to master" half of the franchise's own tagline — Trials games have always rewarded extreme practice and precision. Second, and more specific to this particular corpus, the documented access and launcher problems plausibly mean a real share of Steam purchasers never got the game running smoothly enough to engage with its achievement-tracked content at all, an explanation directly supported by reviewer accounts of being unable to launch the game due to Ubisoft Connect issues. Both factors likely compound each other: a genuinely demanding game that some purchasers can't even access cleanly will show a flatter completion curve than either factor would produce alone.

A pattern worth naming across this developer-publisher relationship

It's worth stating plainly what this review corpus collectively documents, since the pattern is specific enough to name directly: this is a case where a studio's design work and a publisher's business and technical decisions are judged almost entirely separately by the same reviewers, often within the same individual review. That's a distinct and more clear-cut version of the "publisher practices outrank gameplay" pattern this outlet has documented in several other major 2019 releases — here, reviewers aren't just weighing monetisation against gameplay quality in the abstract, they're explicitly and repeatedly naming RedLynx and Ubisoft as separate entities deserving separate judgment, with real affection for the former and real frustration directed specifically at the latter. Prospective buyers should read this corpus with that separation in mind: the 61.8% positive score understates how good the underlying racing actually is, and overstates how forgiving reviewers are being about everything wrapped around it.

Verdict

Trials Rising's actual racing and platforming hold up as well as its predecessors, by wide and consistent agreement even from its harshest critics — the complaints dominating this corpus are almost entirely about decisions made above the development team, not the physics-based core loop itself. A mandatory launcher causing real access failures, cosmetic loot boxes and a grindy progression structure, and a specific menu regression longtime fans dislike all sit on the other side of the ledger. Buy it for the racing, go in prepared for Ubisoft Connect friction, and treat the loot box economy as background noise to ignore rather than engage with.