Trials of the Blood Dragon

I've spent enough time with Trials games to know exactly when they're cooking and when they're stalling, and Trials of the Blood Dragon does both inside the same level. The pitch is genuinely wild: take the precise, momentum-obsessed physics of Trials and smash it into the synthwave absurdity of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, then follow Rex Power Colt's two teenage kids - Slayter and Roxanne - through Vietnam War 4, Miami, Tokyo, Mars, and a quick detour into Hell itself. On paper that's an instant weekend. In practice, it depends heavily on which half of the game you happen to be playing at any given moment. When you're on the bike, things are good. The core dirt-bike handling is as tight and punishing as series veterans expect: you're managing pitch and momentum across side-scrolling courses stacked with ramps, loops, and collapsing bridges, with generous checkpoints keeping frustration from crossing into controller-throwing territory. RedLynx also piles in extra vehicle variety - an eight-wheeled APC, a mine cart, a remote-control car threading ventilation ducts in a Hotline Miami tribute level, even an upside-down vertical run. The grappling hook layered onto the bike sections genuinely adds a new trick, and the neon-drenched Blood Dragon aesthetic gives every course a visual energy that standard Trials arenas never quite match. The moment you step off the bike, the wheels come off the game entirely. Roxanne's on-foot sections swap into stealth, hacking, and platforming, while both characters occasionally pull out an SMG to blast cyborgs from the saddle. The on-foot controls are where the community consensus and my own experience align hard: the jump feel is loose and floaty, the crouch animation is painfully slow, and insta-death traps punish imprecision that the controls simply cannot support. The jetpack sequences are the worst offenders - they strip away the sense of player agency that Trials is built on and replace it with something that feels borrowed from a half-finished jam project. One critical point worth flagging for the couch-gaming crowd: there is no local multiplayer and no split-screen at all. The leaderboard competition is there for time-trial scores, but if you were hoping to run this as a Saturday night group game, you'll need to pass the controller round the old-fashioned way. The story wrapping all of this together is intentionally terrible in the best possible way - deliberately bad voice acting, VHS-grain animated cutscenes, and pop-culture riffs on Rambo, Total Recall, Doom, and Contra that are genuinely funny for the first few episodes. It wears thin by the back half, but the comedic momentum carries you further than you might expect. At around 27 to 30 levels across eight multi-episode worlds, it clocks in as a few evenings of content rather than a deep campaign. Trials veterans will find the bike sections a notch easier than Fusion at its hardest, but the score-chasing time-trial structure still has replay hooks if you care about rankings. Anyone coming in cold from the Blood Dragon side of the fence should know upfront that this plays nothing like Far Cry - it is, at its heart, a motorbike platformer wearing a very loud jacket.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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