Just remember, this is a review. And also, do not forget or shy away from the fact that Ubisoft has yet to fundamentally handle the toxicity, sexism, and rampant issues within their workplace. They continue to also release tone-deaf games, culturally insensitive works, and games like Riders Republic that oscillate between bliss and blood-boiling ruination.
This is a review for Riders Republic, don’t forget that. I started skateboarding in the early 2000s, an era where extreme sports were extreme to a fault. Skate videos featured fistfights, nudity, bone-chilling bail sections, rampant substance abuse, and more. It was the era of More—always more. Grinding a rail wasn’t enough, you had to throw yourself down a twenty stair rail lest you be ridiculed. A backflip on a dirt bike wasn’t enough, neither was a 720 degree spin on a skateboard. Two backflips and a 900-degree spin were what the people wanted, so the pros risked their lives and delivered. Skydiving wasn’t enough. You had to do it without a parachute and it, of course, had to be an ad for an energy drink.
That era, thankfully, is long gone. The extreme sports of today are, minus the sports themselves, actively pretty chill. Your favorite early-2000s pros are probably sober and promoting wellness, meditation, and healthy culinary lifestyles. Extreme sports are less and less havens for straight white dudes and more so communities for all individuals—like all things, there are outliers and it is still a work in progress, but change is happening. Riders Republic understands the progressive changes to extreme sports culture, while they don’t do anything with it and only handle it at face value (even the THPS remaster did this better), but fails to understand anything else about extreme sports culture. It is “Hello, fellow teens” the game. But it is also more than that, and just remember, this is a review.
Riders Republic is a game about an extreme sports utopia that features a vast open-world collage of various mountain ranges, valleys, snow parks, and vistas. Like the Forza: Horizon series, it does nothing with the fact that it seems like hundreds of thousands of energy drinked-out people with death wishes have just descended upon nature itself, for better and worse. The featured sports are mountain biking, trick biking, skiing, snowboarding, wingsuiting, and jetsuiting. You can switch your sport at any time and races often ask you to flip through multiple sports all in one race. And thankfully, Riders Republic feels amazing to play. The difficulty options are varied so it can be as arcadey or as sim-lite as you’d like it to be. Seeing as it is a game that features jetpack racing, I’ve just opted into the arcadey approach. It is a fun, fun time. Each sport feels wonderful to engage with and unique enough that it doesn’t all blur together. Too bad the rest of the game is a lukewarm buffet of Ubisoft’s worst tendencies blended into one experience that flips from bliss to frustration about every 10-to-15 minutes.
Okay, so the game is fun and the sports all feel great. So what about everything else? Buddy, oh wow, it is bad, bad, bad. Riders Republic is an MMO—kind of. It is a competitive online sports game—kind of. It is a live game—kind of. Riders Republic is 75% “kind of.” It wants to be a connected experience but half the time other player avatars are delineated as little human-shaped graphics, and even when you brush up with a fellow player, you’ll just clip through them. And yeah, you can emote at them. But are you going to do that? Be honest, are you?
Thus, funnily enough, Riders Republic feels pretty isolating—just your player avatar, your extreme sport of choice, and nature. And that’s where it shines. But the game will do its best to always get in your way, to break that bliss with a new tutorial, explanation of a new currency or progression meter, or to cheesily introduce some new limited-time race or weekly challenge. It is a Ubisoft game after all. There is a central hub where you can manage your sponsors (avenues for challenges/ways to spend the free in-game currency), buy and equip new gear (using free or paid currencies), learn new tricks at a tricks hub, or just generally brush shoulders with fellow players such as XxXFreeHeadshotsXxX or ZzKingBalls443zZ. Once you escape the confines of that hellish hub, maybe you’ll have time to explore the world or do some races before the game chooses to talk at you, the player, and that is really where everything falls apart.
Riders Republic’s idea of extreme sports culture is Red Bull, Sobe Life Water, and people who still earnestly say “that’s the shiznit.” Every time the game talks, I want to do anything else. Thankfully you can skip most of it, but not all. Oh no, not all of it. The main character that talks to you is some old extreme sports head who has a food truck at the game’s central hub, and he is so annoying. He’s nothing more than a caricature of what people thought extreme sports folks were like two decades ago. It is genuinely hard to put into words how much this game misses the mark and fails to understand the general warmth, nonchalance, and general quietness of most extreme sportspeople. Everyone I skate with is very quiet, chill, and mild-mannered.
Nobody in Riders Republic is any of those things. Someone must’ve watched the 2003 movie, Grind, and saw that as a documentary on extreme sports culture rather than a gross, shitty early 2000s bro-comedy. But like I said, thankfully, you can skip most of the dialogue. Yet, the misunderstanding of extreme sports culture extends to the game’s soundtrack—this 2021 game, remember that. Rise Against, a ukulele cover of Gangsta’s Paradise, mid-2010s stadium folk, and more. The soundtrack is akin to Abercrombie, Pac Sun, and Journeys tossing all of their 2010 store playlists into a blender. It is laughably bad. But there is one Thom Yorke song. Also, Red Bull sponsors like 90% of the things in Riders Republic and honestly, that is kind of realistic. Energy drinks have had a stranglehold on extreme sports and their athletes since the 1990s. It sucks but it is realistic, at least. Everyone in the game is loud, wears visually loud clothes, and is just way too extra. No one I know, even the surfers I know, is close to how extreme sports folks are portrayed in the game. That is honestly one of the biggest bummers about Riders Republic, but hey when has a Ubisoft game successfully and honestly portrayed a community? Oh, and this is still a review.
In an effort not to end this thing on a downer note—which, don’t let this next paragraph or two fool you—this game is more or less just a bummer until you skip everything and play it with the volume somehow cranked below 0, it’s time to go through what it is like to actually play Riders Republic. The game’s core activities are broken up into races, trick events, extreme challenges (or something like that), and discovery nodes. There are also mass races that are in-game events where 64 players all hop into a race together, but they suck so it isn’t even worth diving into. Trick events are a blast and feel like the best parts of Steep mixed with SSX, and the races (no matter the sport, but the bike ones are the best) all leave me white-knuckled. Each activity—of which there seems to be an endless amount—is genuinely always a blast and only lasts two to five minutes. None of them overstay their welcome which, in all honesty, is a pretty rare thing in AAA games these days.
But my favorite aspects of the game are the extreme challenges and discovery nodes. The extreme challenges lean into the absurd: do a parkour course on a bike, wingsuit as close to the ground as possible, or ski off of a few hundred-foot drop and see if you can manage to land it. They are all fun and genuinely hard, but not in a way that feels frustrating. The discovery nodes are little yellow question marks on the map (they are for either special gear crates or scenic vistas where the game pulls back and describes the significance of the real landmark that is represented in the game) and it is in making my way to each of those that the game feels closest to actually being a representation of extreme sports. It becomes very personal and it is up to you to find your way to the node through sheer creativity, experimentation, and defiance—which are three key things that drive us to actually engage in extreme sports. But the nodes are fleeting, and once you’ve discovered them all, you’re left with a vast open-world, meaningless player avatars, increasingly annoying set-dressing, and an overall sense that Riders Republic doesn’t know what it wants to be and doesn’t understand the community it tries to showcase.
Riders Republic is a comedy of errors that just so happens to be incredibly fun to play. In that way, it is a truly bizarre experience. Wading through countless hours of annoyance just for a few minutes of fun probably isn’t the effort, but here I am still collecting stars (oh yeah, you collect stars for everything they do and they help level you and your sports up so that you can take on harder challenges and unlock more annoying gear) thirty hours later. I can’t say I’d recommend this game, and if you see yourself as someone in any extreme sports community, then I’d doubly not recommend it. But also, when will we get another game that lovingly crafts a vast amount of the game experience around mountain biking and downhill racing? That alone is pretty cool. Enjoy it at your own peril. And be sure to queue up your own music. This is still a review and it has now come to an end.