Riders Republic Early Review: It’s Already Something Special

It will be weeks, if not months, before we see the full potential of Republic of horsemen, a smorgasbord of extreme sports debuting today after private online testing limited to specific parts of the map. Players (and reviewers) just got their first glimpse of the whole from its open world, a huge hodgepodge of seven US National Parks, populated with countless online players. The game and its ambitions are great.

So yeah, it will take us a moment to see all the sights and improvise our feelings into a full overhaul. But I would be remiss not to share, right now, the only thing you need to know: Republic of horsemen it’s something special, even during the Trial Week period that I played before the game’s release.

You select from a variety of extreme sports – mountain biking, snowboarding, and jetpacking, to name a few – and then dash down the side of a mountain before racing with your teammates to the finish line. From there, the general path forks in countless directions, all of which have one crucial thing in common: putting fun above all else.

Do you want to go to the top of a mountain? Open the map, select a location and woosh, you’re done.

Do you want to change your sport? Press and hold a button on the bumper and change it on the fly. No need to pause or load.

Do you want to ignore the game completely and explore with friends? The in-game campaign is optional from one race to the next. Otherwise, you will stay in the middle of their world to find your adrenaline wherever you want.

If you choose to compete, the culmination of this “fun above all things” philosophy is massive races, in which dozens of players race dangerously down unbuilt roads for so many fragile bags of human flesh, filling the screen with a blur. of colors. sportswear. Skill will get you to the front of the pack, but winning these races can often become a matter of chance as you slam into your fellow racers, all trying to cut through a dense thicket of trees or a small passageway at the bottom of a canyon.

Fair? Not that much. Fun? You’re right!

During my six hours in its mountains and valleys, what I enjoyed the most was experimenting with how open the game is. In a race, my rider transformed in midair from a mountain biker to a skier using rockets for skis. A good person on Twitter advised me to play with the transformation out of the competition, so I put on a jetpack and sped over a highway, then switched to a road bike. I presumably broke the dirt speed record on a bike before throwing my rider hundreds of feet off a cliff.

This style will be familiar to fans of Steep, Ubisoft Annecy’s predecessor to Republic of horsemen. I often say Steep it’s the best game anyone has ever played, but that’s not really true. Ubisoft’s open-world winter extreme sports bonanza struggled at launch, but when Sony added the title to PlayStation Plus in 2018, nearly 10 million people took to the slopes. Ubisoft has said less about how long those 10 million players stayed.

For me the pleasure of Steep It was in the hours I spent silently gliding down virgin slopes, just me and my Spotify chillout playlist. Riders Republic still allows for this, thanks to a comprehensive menu option that can remove other players and mute the dominant soundtrack. But its creators have realized that while empty tracks appeal to me, most people playing video games in 2021 want to be around other people: friends, competitors, anyone.

Republic of horsemen is more than a review of Steep than a rewrite, a creative team that takes all the lessons learned from a draft and starts over from scratch. It has more extreme sports, sure, but the most important thing is that it is a deeply more social experience. He exudes joy, without relying on the fundamentals of his contemporaries, such as combat, winner-take-all competition, and melodramatic linear storytelling.

Can you maintain that community? Will enough players be able to bear his embarrassing dialogue? And if the fan base increases to 10 million or more, how will the servers be maintained? And what about the roadmap for updates that any game of this type demands?

Those are the questions we’ll keep in mind as we delve into the game once its servers are open to all. But there is so much here to love as it is. It’s tempting to award this Polygon Recommendations badge right away, but for now, we’ll practice patience and use this as an excuse to spend a few more hours doing “work.”

Republic of horsemen will be released on October 28 on Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Windows PERSONAL COMPUTER, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game was tested on PC using a pre-launch download code provided by Ubisoft. Vox Media has affiliate associations. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.