Trials Evolution: Gold Edition

I've watched a lot of Saturday night gaming sessions go sideways the moment someone boots up a Trials game, and Gold Edition is exactly the version I'd pull out for a crowd. You get two complete games here: Trials Evolution and the older Trials HD, together delivering well over 120 tracks that ramp from approachable beginner runs to obstacle courses that would make a stunt coordinator weep. The premise is ruthlessly simple: get a motorbike from one end of a 2.5D obstacle course to the other as fast as possible, with as few crashes as possible. Four buttons. Infinite suffering. Maximum fun. The core loop is what the Trials series has always done best. You control the bike and rider independently, so every micro-adjustment of your weight shift matters. Lean too far back on a steep ramp and you loop out. Nail the throttle timing and you float over an obstacle that was brutalising you thirty seconds ago. The medal system ties everything together: bronze, silver, and gold awards unlock new track sets, and chasing that gold on a track you've replayed twenty times is the kind of compulsion that makes you look up and realise it's 2am. Supercross multiplayer events support up to four lanes of head-to-head competition online, while standard races put all riders on the same lane as ghosts, competing purely for the fastest time. The level editor is a genuine highlight, too, and on PC the mouse-and-keyboard controls make it far more usable than it ever was on console. Now for the honest part. Online multiplayer was officially shut down in January 2024, so any matchmaking or leaderboard chasing is gone. That kills a real chunk of what made the multiplayer modes exciting in their heyday. The "Gold Edition" label is also a little misleading: the two DLC packs for Trials Evolution, Origin of Pain and Riders of Doom, which added extra bikes, levels, and skill games, were never included and are simply absent. On the technical side, the PC port at launch had well-documented framerate issues, particularly with AMD graphics cards, and while patches addressed much of it over the years, this is still not the tidiest PC conversion you'll find. Play with a gamepad; keyboard controls are practically unplayable for anything beyond the tutorial tracks. For solo players, there is still a mountain of content here. The two environments, Crash County from Evolution and the HD Warehouse from Trials HD, keep the visual scenery varied enough that the repetitive structure stays fresh longer than you'd expect. Bike and rider customisation adds a cosmetic hook across five unlockable bikes, each with progressively higher performance and difficulty to handle. The track editor and its community creations, even with online infrastructure gone, give the singleplayer experience a long tail worth exploring. If you want a couch-friendly, chaos-inducing night with friends, the ghost-based multiplayer format means you can set hot-seat sessions on one machine without any network headaches. Just know going in that this is a game about controlled failure, not accessibility, and the back half will absolutely eat people alive.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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