Title: Urban Trial Playground
Platform: Nintendo Switch eShop
Developer: Teyon
Publisher: Tate Multimedia
Release Date: April 5th, 2018 (NA)
Review copy provided by Tate Multimedia
Urban Trial is a series that began on PS3 and Vita as Urban Trial Freestyle. It was later released on 3DS to huge success. So huge in fact, that Tate decided to make the sequel Urban Trial Freestyle 2 a 3DS-exclusive. Teyon were recruited to develop the second game, and now both teams are again working together on the 3rd game exclusively on Switch. How does this game fare? Does it drive smoothly or does it crash with hilarious rag doll physics? Let’s find out!
The main menu
The first thing you’ll notice is how similar this game looks to Nintendo’s own Excitebike. You’re on a 2.5D plane, you perform jumps, and have to adjust your balance to land correctly or else you’ll crash. Here the goals are usually either to reach the goal with enough points to earn 5 stars, or to finish quick enough to earn 5 stars.
Bike customization menu
Earning points is easy by doing back or front flips, landing on your front or back wheel, doing wheelies by holding the left stick leftward to balance on your back wheel (which is very important as it boosts your speed), etc. There’s also a combo system where if you perform stunts and tricks in succession while avoiding having both wheels touch the ground, your earned points during said combo will multiply by the combo amount.
Tommy during a jump in the first main level
During stages, you’re also given challenges that range from having to finish without crashing, or doing a certain amount of a specific trick, and others like staying in the air for 2 seconds. Doing these earns you funds that can be spent on upgrades for your bike. Upgrades include the engine, wheels, brakes, paint jobs, and stickers. Each category upgrades a stat, such as the engine for speed, wheels for agility, and brakes for, I assume, better braking. You can also buy different clothes for your player character as well!
Tommy performing a wheelie
You can also find casino-style chips in most levels (usually in levels that require points to earn stars, but can be found in some timed stages) that give you additional funds. These can be a tad tricky to find, but usually they can be found underneath high jumps (you can move in reverse by using holding the Y button while holding left on the left stick), or up above a ramp where you need to do a really well-timed jump to reach it (you can get extra air by tapping the R button just before leaving the ramp to jump higher).
Riley performing combo stunts
Graphically it’s mostly a very pretty game. It’s built on Unreal Engine 4 and if I’m correct, it is the very first ever released Switch-exclusive game to do so, beating other UE4 exclusives like the still missing in action Yoshi game, Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, and Shin Megami Tensei V. Environments are well detailed and well constructed. Lighting is very impressive also. Framerate is a mostly solid 30fps. Resolution appears to be sub 720p docked but it’s not too bad. One oddity is that upon loading anything, the background takes an extra second to load the assets, so you’ll see the details and whatnot pop-in upon loading. It’s not a real biggie but still, I guess the alternative is making load screens a second longer?
Riley at the start of another level, note the still to be completed challenge
The game’s audio actually impressed me. Music’s actually a tad catchy (especially the tune that plays when the level ends). The player character (you can play as a boy or a girl!) is also kind of funny in that the player’s just a one-person catchphrase machine. They even says a particular line famous among fans of a blue hedgehog, you know the one!
Riley… thought she was in Skate 3 for a moment!
Overall I had fun with this game. It’s got good replay value for those who want to beat all the challenges and collect all the chips. There are online leaderboards for you to try to be the very best like no one ever was (hell I’m on top of quite a few of them right now!). There’s also a multiplayer split-screen mode for 2 people (I’ve not tested this however). The challenges at times are difficult (like one where you can’t land on your front wheel doing a “stoppie”), but still, they’re fun to do. I found myself playing more and more of the game, it got addicting at times! If you like Excitebike and/or just want some kind of pretty trick-racing game, I highly recommend it!
You’ll Love:
+ Visually it’s impressive, bar the slow loading of assets, low resolution, and some graphical hiccups here and there (flickering assets).
+ It’s one of those easy to learn, hard to master kinds of games I feel.
+ Bar a small handful of challenges, most are easy to medium difficulty.
+ Incentives to keep playing and earn more funds to buy upgrades. Same goes for getting better scores to reach the top of the online leaderboards.
+ Crashing is hilarious at times because the rag doll physics can lead to some… interesting results as shown above!
You’ll Hate:
– As mentioned, the visuals have some hiccups.
– Levels do repeat at times but I find there are about… 50/50 new and repeated levels throughout maybe? Maybe more new ones.
– The aforementioned hard challenges. LOTS of trial and error at times.
– The game forced-quit with an error message twice. Hopefully this is addressed soon. This only occurred when retrying levels though. The game autosaves so it’s not a huge deal I think.
Score: 8.5/10
