RIDE 6

My first question any time a new motorcycle sim drops is the same one I ask about every racer: can four people squeeze onto this game on a Friday night, and does it hold up when someone picks up the controller for the first time? With RIDE 6, the answers are a qualified yes and a surprisingly firm yes. Milestone shipped split-screen two-player and full cross-platform online multiplayer, and they paired it with a dual-physics system that lets newcomers run Arcade mode while series veterans sweat through Pro mode on the same sofa. You can even switch between the two outside of an active race, which is the kind of small design call that makes a big practical difference when your friend insists they want to try the "real" settings halfway through a session. The career, framed around a motorcycle festival called RIDE Fest, borrows its visual energy from the Forza Horizon school of festival theming. It works better than the marketing made it sound. There is no open world to ride around, but the RIDE Fest hub gives the menu system a sense of place, and the Fame Points progression unlocks chapters, invitational races, and boss encounters organically rather than forcing you down a rigid ladder. Those boss chapters pit you in 1v1 finales against ten real-world legends including Guy Martin, Troy Bayliss, and Casey Stoner, each tied to their actual discipline. It is a structure that could easily have felt like a gimmick, but in practice those encounters serve as honest skill checks that punctuate an otherwise steady grind. The career reportedly takes over 30 hours to fully complete, and with branching event paths you are rarely forced to replay identical events back to back. The real headline addition for longtime fans is the off-road content. For the first time in the RIDE series, Maxi Enduro and Bagger categories join the roster alongside dirt oval short tracks and ADV circuits. The seven bike categories now run from sportsbikes and nakeds through scooters, motard, and enduro, all the way to those lumbering, torquey Baggers that are genuinely fun to wrestle around a tarmac circuit. Across all categories the physics land somewhere between committed sim and approachable semi-sim. On Pro, you are managing weight transfer, braking points, throttle modulation, ABS levels, traction control, engine braking, and anti-wheelie settings. That electronics suite is adjustable per event and rewards the kind of obsessive pre-race tinkering that will feel very familiar to anyone who spent serious time in RIDE 4. On Arcade, those demands soften but the game still asks you to commit to corner entries properly, which keeps it honest. Accessibility options go further than expected too: automatic braking, semi-auto and full-auto steering, one-handed controls, and a rewind feature borrowed from the Forza and F1 playbooks mean that physical limitations are not a barrier to entry. Not everything landed cleanly. Steam user scores sat in Mixed territory at launch, and the most common gripes align with what press reviewers flagged: AI opponents that can turn into you on close passes rather than yielding, some menu event repetition during extended career sessions, and a sense that the RIDE Fest dressing is thinner than it looks once you realize you are still navigating races through menus rather than riding to them. The Unreal Engine 5 upgrade brought cleaner lighting and weather systems, and rain genuinely affects both visibility and handling, but bike and rider models did not take the same leap forward, which is a visible mismatch. Multiplayer matchmaking drew some complaints about random kick-outs and stuttering, so competitive online is still a bit of a lottery depending on your connection. For the sports and racing crowd, RIDE 6 is the closest thing on PC and Xbox to a comprehensive motorcycle encyclopedia that you can also race. If you bounced off RIDE 5 because the career felt locked and restrictive, the flexible Fame Points system genuinely fixes that. If you are brand new to the series, Arcade mode and the Bridgestone Riding School give you an actual on-ramp. The split-screen support alone puts it ahead of most contemporaries for couch sessions, and a post-launch plan running through late 2027 means the bike roster will keep expanding. Just go in knowing this is an evolutionary entry, not a ground-up reinvention.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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