I want to like Riders Republic, but I can’t get over everything I hate

We were not given early access to review Riders Republic, Ubisoft’s new open-world action sports game. So while you wait for our full review, here are some thoughts on the game after nearly a dozen hours. We hope to publish a formal review sometime next week.

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I think the best way to describe Riders Republic is to tell them about their soundtrack. Specifically, two songs featured and played ad nauseam over almost all races and goals.

The first song is “All I Want” from The Offspring’s 1997 album. Ixnay on the Man. If the name doesn’t sound right away, it’s perhaps better known as the song on Crazy Taxi. You know, the song “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah”. That.

The second is a cover of Coolio’s historic 1996 song “Gangsta’s Paradise”, softly performed by Les Ukulélés Girls, with artist Zita. Replacing the bass and drums of the original, and the almost icy cold keyboard lead that rests on them, it is the light strum of a ukulele as a woman creates her own melodies, assuring you that she is, in fact, “a locomotive.” . “I got out of gangsta, I put trippin ‘banger on.” Actually, before continuing, I think you should listen to it yourself. It really is one of the worst things I have ever heard in my entire life.

I bring these two songs because I think they completely encapsulate everything bad about Riders Republic. “All I Want” is iconic for a reason. Its inclusion in Crazy Taxi for the Dreamcast came at a crucial time for open world game design. While we largely view the Sega Dreamcast as a flop these days, the Sega console was full of fascinating and unique games. Yes, they were commercial products released by a giant company, but games like Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi targeted a whole new audience of teens and young adults because they were created by people who understood and lived in that youth culture. The inclusion of a song like “All I Want” on Crazy Taxi was iconic because it spoke to the audience of the time. It was great and unique for a band like The Offspring to appear in a video game, especially one like Crazy Taxi.

I don’t want to speak out of turn, but I think “Gangsta’s Paradise” has a similar position within pop culture. It speaks of a specific time and place in Coolio’s life and is meant to resonate with the people who relate to his lyrics. Distilling the emotion of that original song into a poorly sung and shredded ukulele version destroys what makes the original special in the first place.

Like taking a song popularized by another game, Crazy Taxi, and putting it into your big-budget action sports title. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what Ubisoft does – try to capitalize on specific and important cultural milestones in its own way. Mind you, there are four songs from The Offspring in this game. Four. In 2021. In addition to two songs from Green Day’s most recent album, Father of all … You know, that Green Day album that everyone knows and loves.

Who exactly is this game for?

Riders Republic is desperate to make you think it’s cool. At all times. He’s constantly throwing jargon at you that no one outside of the Ubisoft writers room has said in the last 20 years. Constant jokes about exploding “a whole new level of drunkenness,” whatever that means, all said without a hint of self-awareness or irony. It is repeated over and over again in dialog messages that cannot be skipped and that are played each time you move through a certain part of the game map or while traversing the world. It wasn’t great the first time; it’s unbearably unbearable the twelfth time. I’m afraid of what I may do when I finally hear it for the hundredth time.

This is the same problem with the game’s soundtrack. Most of this game is racing, and every time you load into one, by my estimate, there’s an 80 percent chance that one of The Offspring’s songs or Coolio’s version will play. There is a radio in the game with different genres and stations, but once you get into a great race, the game has a predetermined soundtrack. Play a dozen races and chances are, you’ll hear the same three songs a dozen times. Once, while working on a race, “All I Want” was played twice in a row. I considered throwing my PlayStation 5 off a cliff.

What bothers me so much about Riders Republic is that underneath its insincere attempt to be cool and edgy is a fantastic racing game. The huge open world of Riders Republic, based on a large handful of real parks in the United States, such as Mammoth and Yosemite, is fantastic, huge and constantly changing. Descending a snowy mountain on my snowboard before launching down a ramp, high in the air, changing into my wingsuit, which I use to slide back to earth, switching to my mountain bike at the last second to finish my return trip. at sea level, it’s constantly exhilarating, especially if you’re playing first-person, which makes everything feel faster than humanly possible.

The races are all fun, despite the music. Going down a field against 63 other players, while beating down your opponents, desperately trying to outrun them and not riding off the side of a sheer cliff is hilarious, challenging, and bracing.

Putting my skills to the test with various sports is outstanding. Multi-sport racing forces you to switch from bikes to wingsuits, skis, and more, ready or not. This is a great way to test players, to make them use all the Riders Republic mechanics. And when you are capable of a long and complex career, it rewards you with immense satisfaction.

Committing to the good parts of Riders Republic also means committing to a lot of things that I find unbearable. And that’s really unfortunate. Because the things I like about Riders Republic, the Really like. Hell, I love them. But the things I hate enter my skin in a way that few games do. I really want to like this game, but this game seems hell-bent on not allowing that to happen.

To be fair, at this point, most action sports have been commercialized and corporatized beyond the point of recognition. But still, forcing myself to play Riders Republic hour after hour, I can’t forget how gross this all feels. The race is cool, but everything else feels like the developers took a look at a world that they didn’t care enough about to really understand and then tried to replicate it without any knowledge of how to engage with their ostensible audience or the people they are targeting. that they were imitating. first. It is a vulture of culture in the form of a video game. The writing and music are examples of the various ways Riders Republic just doesn’t get it.

Riders Republic wants you to think It’s great, who knows what’s cool and who will give you a crash course on how to be cool. But I think even the lamest person on Earth would see through his veneer. Common sense should dictate that a collection of songs from The Offspring in 2021 is not “a whole new level of style.” Not all of the actual endorsements in the game are from companies like Ford, either. Absolutely nothing is more punk rock than an F150, right? The environment is unpleasant and tasteless. I don’t know if a fun racing mechanic can fix that.