TrackDayR

The thing that reorganises your whole brain here is that your left stick controls the rider's body, and your right controls the bike. Not the camera. Not a tidy little lean assist. Your actual weight, hanging off the inside of the seat, shifting forward under braking, standing the machine up on corner exit. Once that clicks, you stop thinking about the racing line the way you do in a car game and start thinking about where your shoulders are three metres before the apex. It changes everything, including how badly you crash, because a lowside in TrackDayR usually traces back to your body being in the wrong place rather than your thumb being greedy with the throttle. So let's set expectations. This is an Early Access indie sim from MadCow S.r.l., out since March 2021, and it has been in steady development ever since. You get pitbikes, minibikes, full superbikes, quads and sidecars, plus recreations of real circuits alongside the tight little technical tracks that are honestly where the game teaches you the most. Structure is thin by design: ride, train, chase your own lap times, then jump into online PvP lobbies and community events, with Steam leaderboards keeping score. There is no career mode dangling contracts in front of you and no sponsor cutscenes. The progression is entirely inside your own hands. What works is the feel, and it works so well that the presentation stops mattering after an hour. The low-speed pitbike stuff is the best tutorial the game has, because at 40kph you can actually feel the front tyre load up and the rear step out without instantly ending up in the gravel. Braking into a corner while trailing off the lever and dragging your body forward is genuinely satisfying in a way that almost nothing else on PC replicates. The community is small but properly invested, which is how you end up with 87 percent positive across more than 2,200 Steam reviews for a game that will humiliate you for your first three sessions. Riders help each other with setup, and organised online races are where the whole thing pays off. Now the parts that will annoy you, and as your resident couch-multiplayer person I have a list. There is no split screen. There is no local multiplayer at all. Every competitive lap you ride happens online against people who almost certainly have more practice than you, so if you were hoping to hand a friend a second pad on a Saturday night, this is the wrong purchase. Steam Family Sharing at least means you can lend the whole thing to a mate rather than racing them. Controller support is listed as partial, which in practice means you want a decent gamepad with precise analog sticks for riding and a mouse handy for the menus. Keyboard riding is technically possible and practically pointless. It is PC only, the interface still looks like a work in progress, and the difficulty curve is a wall rather than a ramp. Expect a couple of hours of falling over before you complete a clean lap you are proud of, and expect online lobby population to swing depending on when you log on. Who should actually buy this? Anyone who has ridden a real bike and wants that specific feeling of committing weight to a corner. Anyone who bounced off arcade motorcycle games for being too floaty and off the bigger licensed racing franchises for being too forgiving. Anyone happy to treat a sim as a skill to practise rather than content to consume. Who should skip it? Casual players who want to win races in their first evening, anyone who needs a fleshed-out career mode, and anyone whose multiplayer plans involve four people, one TV and a bowl of crisps. This one is a solo obsession that occasionally opens the door to strangers online, and if that sounds good to you, you will get an enormous amount out of it. Just budget the practice time honestly before you start.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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