RIDE 3

I'll be straight with you: my usual Saturday night co-op test failed RIDE 3 immediately. There is no local split-screen, the online lobby system amounts to being auto-dropped into the nearest public room with zero matchmaking logic, and the tutorials are so hands-off that a newcomer will be binned into the gravel before they understand why. If your plan was to hand a controller to a mate who's never ridden a motorcycle sim, plan something else for that evening. That said, once you adjust your expectations and accept that RIDE 3 is a dedicated, niche sim built for the kind of person who has actual opinions about the difference between a Ducati Panigale V4 and a BMW S1000RR, a lot of it clicks into place. The sheer volume of content here is the headline. Over 230 officially licensed motorcycles span seven distinct bike classifications, from vintage road bikes to supermoto and superbikes, and the career mode structures races across a fictional racing magazine concept, running through roughly 50 different volumes, each focused on a specific bike type or style. The tracks are a genuine treat for motorsport fans: Laguna Seca's corkscrew, the Nordschleife, Cadwell Park, the North West 200 road course, Brands Hatch, and Portimao all feature, reproduced using photogrammetry. The attention to detail on the bikes themselves is exceptional, and the livery editor lets you build custom designs with up to 1,000 layers, which is the kind of depth that either excites you immediately or tells you this game was not made with you in mind. The riding model sits in an interesting middle ground. It is not the full-fat, unforgiving punishment of a hardcore PC sim, but enabling all assists still will not save you from feeling like the bike has genuine mass and consequence. Weight shifts through chicanes feel deliberate, lean angles matter, and the handlebar camera option is the way to go once you've built up track knowledge. The physics engine, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 4, is the strongest part of the package. Where things fall apart is the career structure itself: the loop of race, earn money, buy a new bike, repeat gets repetitive fast, and the AI has well-documented quirks where opponents on higher difficulty settings appear to ignore the laws of physics on the final lap. Load times, on PC as on console at launch, were a recurring complaint from the community and something to be aware of if you have a traditional hard drive rather than an SSD. The online side is thin. Public lobbies lack ranked progression, skill-based matching, or any kind of structured series. You get private and public races, and that is about it. For a game with this much solo content it is probably fine, but anyone hoping for a live competitive scene will be disappointed. Casual players who picked this up expecting assists to make it feel arcade-friendly should also note that control assists help at corners and under braking, but they do not fundamentally change the game's character. This is a sim that rewards patience and repetition, not button mashing. For the right audience, which is motorcycle enthusiasts and sim racing players who want something genuinely different from the four-wheeled pack, RIDE 3 delivers more content than almost anything else in its niche. The bike roster and track list alone justify a session or ten if motorcycles are your thing. Just go in with realistic expectations about the career grind, the barebones multiplayer, and the near-absence of any onboarding for newcomers. Solo motorcycle sim fans: this is your game. Everyone else: test the waters first.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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