Urban Trial Tricky

My honest first reaction after booting this up was: finally, someone is trying to make motorbike tricks feel like a skateboarding arcade game again. Urban Trial Tricky pulls from three obvious touchstones, the Trials series' 2.5D physics, Tony Hawk's score-chasing mindset, and a pinch of Joe Danger's cartoon energy, and blends them into something that is breezy and approachable but a little rough at the seams. The structure is split across three mode types. Time levels push you to finish a course as fast as possible, sometimes racing against the developer's ghost time, while Tricks levels dump you in a semi-open urban playground and ask you to chain combos for the highest score. Competition stages go further, calling out specific moves you have to execute in order, which is where the game's timing demands get genuinely spiky. Tricks themselves are broken down by category: air tricks, wheelie tricks, and stoppie tricks, with difficulty tiers ranging from easy to extreme. Stringing together a long combo, filling your energy meter, and unleashing a special move for a score multiplier is the hook, and when it clicks, it clicks well. Unlocking new freestyle, breakdance, and FMX moves with in-game currency, then assigning your favourites to button presses, gives the system a light personalisation layer that holds attention past the first few hours. Here is where things get messy, though. The levels, all 30-plus of them, feel cramped. Critics and players alike flagged that there simply is not enough open space to build genuine speed before the course shoves an obstacle in your face or clips you on low scenery, which kills combo flow at the worst possible moment. Input registration on trick combos can be unreliable, and the physics, while forgiving by design, occasionally misfires in ways that feel arbitrary rather than fair. The whole campaign runs about five hours if you push through; leaderboard chasing and star collection add replay hooks, but there is no multiplayer of any kind, no split-screen, and no co-op. From a Saturday-night party gaming standpoint, that is a pretty firm wall, you are passing the controller, not competing live. On PC the game runs cleanly at 60fps with fast loading, and the cartoonish art style holds up better than the more realistic look of the previous entry in the series. The hip-hop and instrumental soundtrack is genuinely enjoyable and fits the vibe. Gamepad is the right input choice here, a steering wheel or HOTAS will not help you and frankly would miss the point entirely. This is a thumbstick-and-buttons game through and through, and the control scheme is approachable enough that you can hand it to a non-gamer and they will be backflipping within ten minutes, even if mastering combo multipliers takes real practice. With a Mixed Steam rating on PC and an OpenCritic average sitting in the mid-60s, Urban Trial Tricky is not a hidden gem the algorithm buried. It is an honest budget title with a fun core loop that runs out of ideas and level variety faster than it should. Casual players who just want something colourful and low-stress to fill a couple of evenings will likely get their money's worth. Score chasers who live for leaderboard optimization might squeeze a bit more out of it. Anyone expecting Trials Rising depth, a party-night multiplayer mode, or polished level design will probably bounce off quickly.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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