Milestone S.r.l. have published and developed many racing games with a mix of both cars and bikes though their recent titles have mostly being bikes. RIDE 3 is the latest and it’s packed full of nothing else but bikes.

RIDE 3 isn’t low on bikes and the many brands that make them, there are 27 brands from Honda, Yamaha, Ducati and BMW. The game even has world famous circuits such as the epic Nurburgring, Daytona, Brands Hatch and the iconic bike track that takes place in Isle of Mann. Tracks are a mix of closed circuits and street tracks and races can take place in the day or at night, weather can also be clear skies or rainy conditions.

You can play on a range of difficulties ranging from very easy to extreme, and that can get pretty intense. You can also challenge yourself even more by messing around with settings to do with your bikes. If it’s not automatically leaning into corners or changing your gear box from semi-auto to manual, there are other settings that are more technical. What’s also a part of RIDE 3 is the choice to rewind if you happen to fall off your bike. It doesn’t take much for this to happen, maybe your rear tire touches another bikes and boom both are wiped out or sometimes just one rider, but when you fall off you’ll look like your flying and if this was real life I could only imagine the sounds of bones crunching as the rider hit the track surface. I’m not the biggest fan of the rewind feature but it’s there to be used if you choose to.

Rigth off the start, you’ll name your rider, choose outfits/appearance and a racing number along with the option to create liviers for your bikes. Bike upgrades can improve performance by a lot and is worth doing if you have the cash. In quick mode you can loan much better bikes for free, it’s good to see what you might want to buy and keep down the road.

Quick mode gives players the choice to drag race, or beat their best times in time trials along with proper races without the career mode stresses, it’s a mode good for hardly any commitment. Weekly challenges are always working their way into racing games and RIDE 3 is one of them. It’s a pre selected bike and track and the goal is to get the best time which are shown when going into this part of the game. The biggest part of RIDE 3 is it’s career mode.

There are six levels each having nine events to do with a selection of races/time trials and championships, do them to unlock the special event and make your way up the levels to finally reach the grand finale. Finishing races in first is best, because stars will be earnt and it’s those very stars that are needed to progress through the career mode. Money shouldn’t be wasted either because bike purchases are forever coming up in your career.

When it comes to racing games online they can either be a great extension to the game, or an utter mess if it’s connection issues or just not enough people are playing online, and although RIDE 3 has both online multiplayer and private matches there is two issues with both. First there is no local multiplayer, to play private matches you need to be friends with others on the platform you’re playing on, if not that option is dead to you. If you want to test your bike skills with others around the globe you can forget that too, as many times I tried day after day to find just one game online and I only managed to stare at an never ending loading screen, or if I was lucky the game would instantly say connection issues with Xbox Live. So if you’re hoping to get every trophies/achievement you won’t unless this manages to be fixed because there are two that online play is required to obtain them.

The first RIDE game was in 2015, and it looked poor from what I saw but that was three years ago, surly the franchise has improved, and well I can say it’s a decent looking racing game with bikes, sure it’s not without its flaws which ill explain. I played this on Xbox One X which gave me the choice of favour the resolution or frame rate. Both had their own pros and cons. So the great debate is what do people prefer when it comes to playing games, a solid 60fps? or the highest resolution possible, for me it depends on the game. RIDE 3 had me trying out both and well the resolution mode does make the game look a little nicer it lost me due to how poor the game performed when in an actual race. The favour frame rate in my opinion was the best option from the two, sure you’ll lose some clarity, which is noticeable in the main menu and on the bikes during the race but the performance from the higher frame rate made me care less about the resolution, because lets face it, games can be native 4K in some cases, but if they can’t give a smooth experience it’s useless. It’s a game by game choice when the option to favour one over the other. There is another bonus for Xbox One X owners with televisions that support HDR, and that’s the High Dynamic Range the game supports.

As for the sounds for RIDE 3, bikes make braaap braap and baaaaaaaaaa baahhhhhhhh sounds don’t they? Cause that’s all I hear and if that’s correct than RIDE 3 is doing that right. The one thing I didn’t pick up on right away was when in the menu of the game you’ll hear music, but once a race begins you’ll no longer hear any music, nothing but the roar of the motorcycles in the race. It’s nothing to cry about, I find myself with other racing titles turning off the music because when they have a music soundtrack with real songs they can become repetitive, in the case of RIDE 3 this won’t ever happen and it gives it a more serious racing game vibe. Also maybe 2 or 3 races into the career mode I did get plagued with some audio issues, sound completely cutting out only when in a race but it soon stopped and I hadn’t had that issue since than.

RIDE 3 had me sceptical prior to playing, was it just another bike game that wasn’t that good, but it was far better than I thought it would be. It’s career mode is fairly long and the mechanics of the bikes around the track is realistic and the large amount of bikes really shocked me. So yeah, RIDE 3 is a game we as gamers should pick up and play.

Written by: MKAU Gaming