Ride 3 – PS4 review

By John Hay
| 28th November 2018
| PS4, Review
| 0

I can’t confess to being a huge motorbike fan in real life or gaming. My wife wants one in real life, I’m quite the deathmonger when it comes to talking about it. When it comes to game’s I tend to pass them by, with the last I bought being Driveclub bikes. So, who better to review Drive 3 than me?

First off I’ll get the basics out of the way. The driving physics and how the bikes handle seems like a mix between simulation and arcade, with it being a little more weighted towards arcade. I found it quite tough going out the gate and I seemed to fall off quite a bit. I really thought this was going to be a hellish game to review but luckily, after wiping out and restarting a few times, I found a rewind button that lets you reply the last 20 seconds or so. I was pleased about this at the time but quickly came to dislike it (I’ll get to that later). After a while it became obvious to me that the key to victory was upgrades, I was racing bikes that were faster than me and I simply could not win.

As the upgrades were installed not only did my performance improve but I found that I was also winning all the time, I was working my way through the various series the game has on offer for you to tackle. There are a few different types of bikes on offer, from classics that are a bit slower to modern hyper fast sports bikes. Each category has a series of races to tackle in a set difficulty level after you gain enough series wins you can tackle the later events and earn more money to fill your bike collection.

There are 25-26 different locations, with most locations having a few track layouts for you to tackle, so there are plenty of tracks to keep you busy. The only issue is that most of them look the same because a large chunk of them are racing tracks, and this game doesn’t have a lot going on in the backgrounds. There are tracks outside, and although the visuals are hardly what I’d call impressive they are not horrible but they have nothing going on. The developers could have added some spectators, some lighting effects, something to give the game a bit of a spark. You can drive at night, and on some tracks, this looks really nice. One of the things I loved about Driveclub was the dynamic lighting effects and the fact the tracks felt alive. Something like that would have been nice here.

As it is I’m left feeling like Ride is something like a ps3 game that’s tarted up to look like a ps4 game, nothing really has a great level of detail (even when I was running the pro enhanced resolution mode). I mean it’s not a bad game, it has plenty to offer on the single player front, but with a rewind mode, you can use as much as you like there is not really a challenge on offer (that was what annoyed me, it should be limited to just a few per race). As you would expect from a racing game in 2018 you can hop online to challenge real players.