Urban Trial Freestyle Review

By , on July 11, 2014
Last modified 9 years, 8 months ago


Urban Trial Freestyle
Download on the AppStore
3 out of 5

PROS

  • Looks great
  • Good range of tracks and obstacles
  • Plenty of content and challenges

CONS

  • Unresponsive leaning controls
  • Rapid acceleration leads to multiple retries
  • Tracks are not balanced for the mobile version

VERDICT

Urban Trials Freestyle is a great technical port of the original console game, but the controls leave you struggling to pull off the maneuvers needed to get top times.


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Urban Trial Freestyle is a port of a Playstation game that offers you the chance to try the sport of motorcycle trials. Hopping onto a two-wheeled trickster, you must defy gravity to fly over all manner of outlandish urban areas, and make it to the end of each track.

Set across an entire city, UTF is not limited to streets and apartment blocks. You must race over a huge range of obstacles as you cross underground lines, abandoned theme parks, and construction sites. Each setting looks fantastic, with the different themes providing enough variation between hurdles to keep them exciting.

But, whether you are outrunning boulders down a rollercoaster ramp or using a makeshift-seesaw to launch you to a different path through the map, the goal is always to make it to the finish before your time runs out. 

Virtual buttons control the acceleration and braking of your bike. Unfortunately, as you only have a choice of stationary or supersonic speeds, this is where things start to go a bit awry. The binary nature of the throttle makes it tough to control ascent speed on slopes, which can send the unfortunate rider cartwheeling to their death.

Of course, your rider's centre of gravity has a huge effect on how the bike handles, allowing it to wheelie, securely grip the track, or somersault when in the air. All of these skills are vital to scoring top times, and can be executed with both tilt and slider controls, though neither offers 100% preceision.

If racing the three minute time limits wasn't difficult enough, tracks are also littered with bonus challenges. These ask you to land perfect jumps, reach new heights, and set top speeds, utilising the levels geometry to secure your place on the online leaderboards. These add wecome variety, though, again, the control issues can result in frustration.

There is a lot in Urban Trial Freestyle to keep you coming back. Its a shame, therefore, that this port’s new controls simply don’t quite do the game justice. Its an entertaining experience, and technically impressive, but its tracks would have benefited from some tweaks for mobile.

Screenshots

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