Trials Evolution: Survival of the Most Extreme

**Judd** · 02-29-2012

Searched everywhere and couldn't find this, also couldn't post in Xbox news?

Get your motor running.

Evolution is an appropriate subtitle for Finnish developer Red Lynx's follow-up to the best-selling Xbox Arcade game Trials HD. It retains so many of the successful traits of its ancestor. You'll find the deceptively simple gameplay mechanics – accelerate, brake, lean forwards and backwards – spliced with an incredibly sophisticated physics engine. But a few mutations have taken place, which have pushed the series forward.

This time round you'll be able to fall from perilous heights that would resulted in broken axels and fractured femurs in Trials HD. This decision hasn't been taken to coddle newcomers – it simply allows the game to be more unhinged in its level design.

Even if you adored Trials HD, you might have seen enough of rickety scaffolding, rusty girders, and explosive canisters to last you a console cycle. Red Lynx openly acknowledges the environmental monotony of the game, and has strived to correct it in Evolution, offering a gauntlet of innovative, playful, and sometimes downright eccentric levels.

You can ride through the murky waters of a Normandy landing ground in 'Beachhead'. Bombs explode around you, sending plumes of water towards the sky. Get to the end and you'll park up in a bunker as nuclear warheads begin to rain down.

Red Lynx insists that no to levels are the same, and from what I saw it seems their promise is true.

You ride'll down a hillside, and thanks to the new curving tracks, you'll finish at the top of the construction side that you saw in the horizon when you were at the starting line. These winding tracks don't dramatically alter the core Trials experience. Gameplay is still riveted to a two-dimensional plane, but it does allow for greater creativity in level design.

But there's also a sense of humour and intertextuality to some levels. Taking cues from Trials HD's 'Dreamscape' and Christopher Nolan's Inception, 'Mind Bender' is a geometrically impossible cityscape. And to make things even stranger, and taxing, the centre of gravity keeps shifting. It's as if the entire level is set within an enormous gimbal. In Trials it requires measured control to escort your rider to the finish line when you can rely on down being down, so this certainly doesn't make things any easier. There's also bizarre surrealistic flourishes, like suspended cubes of water that you'll launch your rider through, emerging on the other side sodden yet hopefully ready to land.

Similarly, Red Lynx isn't afraid to pay homage to video games either. There's even a LIMBO level. Played from a flat side-on perspective, entirely in silhouette and shades of grey, the level see you traverse an eerily familiar landscape of bloodthirsty traps, and you may even encounter the odd giant spider along the way. In a nice touch, whether deliberate or a happy accident, Trials' frequent checkpoints recall the hostile inhabitants you met in LIMBO's bleak world.

Trials Evolution does a better job of parcelling these impressively varied levels than its predecessor. A recurrent piece of feedback about Trials HD was that players were quickly unlocking tracks without the requisite level of skill it took to finish them. Evolution groups levels of graduated difficulty into events – Walk in the Park, Fuel for the Flames, Death Valley, and so on – and intersperses them with License Tests, which are essentially challenged-based tutorials that soften the step up. It isn't a dilution of Trials. When it gets hard, it's merciless. When it gets extreme, it's diabolical. This change hasn't reduced the perilous altitude of the learning curve; it's simply signposted the ascent.

So much has been crammed into Trials Evolution but the advanced level editor that is particularly noteworthy. So daunting is it's distended toolbox of cryptic logic events that a lite version is also included. Both versions take advantage of a 2km by 4km environmental sandpit, which has everything from mountains to streets, forest to water. To build a quick track, simply place a starting and finishing point anywhere in this landscape and you'll have a simple level. You can then populate it with ramps, obstacles, and yes, explosive barrels until your thrill-seeking heart is content.

Red Lynx freely admits that with enough dedication and practice it's possible to reverse engineer any of the levels from Trials HD. But the editor doesn't have to be limited simply to creation racing tracks. The possibilities are extraordinary. From an Angry Birds pastiche – red barrels killed your family, now take revenge – to a first-person shooter, and even a top-down shooter redolent of Galaga, which the developer promises will be downloadable from day one.

As with any kind of crowd-sourced content, there's always going to be an issue surrounding how the content is curated and accessed. Red Lynx has attempted to solve this problem in the form of a dashboard that collects a variety of different feeds. There will be 'Most Downloaded', 'Red Lynx Picks', 'Highest Rated This Week', and so on. It seems an elegant and intuitive way to filter and funnel what is sure to be an overwhelming amount of content. Its long-term functionality, however, ultimately rests upon how the service is maintained. But the tools that have been provided are very promising.

If the complex level designer offers the promise of deferred achievement – the smug satisfaction that comes when surveying the complex lattice of time triggers you've patiently assembled. Multiplayer offers a very different type of pleasure – one that is immediate and frequently hilarious. Up to four players can line-up on the starting line. It's the same Trials experience – you have to ride across an obstacle-laden environment. The winner is determined by a combination of lap-time and the number of faults incurred. The problem of players being left behind offscreen is neatly circumvented in brutal fashion – you'll disappear in a puff of smoke and reappear at the next checkpoint, one fault down.

It's giddy, competitive fun, and the hilarity increases if you turn on 'Bail-out Finishes' at the menu screen. It adds a ridiculous dimension to the final furlong. When approaching the finish line, you can opt to eject your rider from his bike towards the chequered line. Have enough momentum and the right trajectory, and it's possible to win from fourth place. But mess it up, and there's no respawn – you won't finish the race and, as punishment, you will be forced to watch your twitching, flaying body as the other riders finish.

Trials Evolution definitely advances what was already a finely-tuned game. While the gameplay rightly remains unchanged, everything else around it has been amplified. There's more content, more variety, and more creativity all round. If the evolutionary imperative can be boiled down to 'adapt or die', then the follow-up to Trials HD will certainly thrive.

Trials Evolution is scheduled for a release on Xbox Live this Spring.

Source: IGN