After a lengthy drought of fresh titles, the extreme sports genre is primed for a revival. Ubisoft's MMO Riders Republic will allow adrenaline junkies to pursue everything from snowboarding and mountain biking to rocket-assisted wing-suiting. With an enormous open world, and promises of 50+ player matches on PS5/Xbox Series X, Ubisoft seemingly has something for everyone in Republic. 2019 saw the release of another stellar mountain biking title, Descenders, created by Dutch developer RageSquid and published by No More Robots.
While Riders Republic features a truly bombastic take on a wide variety of extreme sports, with humorous cosmetics, over-the-top stunts, and gag-like skins for vehicles, Descenders is closer to a mountain biking sports-sim. Players can still pull of a variety of gravity-defying tricks, and brush off bail outs that would otherwise prove career-ending, but the developer focused on truly nailing the physics and feel of being on a mountain bike. If Riders Republic is a raucous party with a more the merrier mentality, Descenders offers a slightly more grounded test of technique and skill.
More importantly, each game takes its own distinctive approaches to the pursuit of "infinite play," with Descenders featuring functionally limitless gameplay in the form of procedurally generated tracks. Rider's Republic covers a wider variety of extreme sports that each leverage the huge overworld's layout differently.
Finding the Perfect Balance in Rider's Republic
RageSquid set out to correct a deficiency with Descenders, even before they settled on a mountain biking game. Disappointed in the lack of extreme sports titles, the developer tried a variety of different sports — including extreme pogo-sticking, rock-climbing, and wing suiting — before ultimately settling on mountain biking. After that, the team dedicated themselves to striking the perfect balance between arcade-like thrills, and realism, using EA's skateboarding title Skate as its model.
The chief competitor to the Tony Hawk franchise, Skate was incredibly physics intensive, with the game's physics engine accurately simulating the joints in a human body, as opposed to a more fanciful, playful take on the sport. While the Skate series has lain dormant for a long time, Descenders' is keeping its dream alive with a detailed trick system based on combining fluid rider motions to pull off tricks, as opposed to the "fighting game combo" button-input chains featured by Tony Hawk and snowboarding games of the time.
An Endless Biking Roguelike
After RageSquid mastered the feel of mountain biking, they looked to games outside the extreme sports genre for additional influences. The teams' fondness for compelling roguelike titles like Spelunky and FTL led them to consider combining the roguelike genre with the biking sim. The result gelled like peanut butter and jelly. Extreme sports gamers essentially had an endless font of tracks to exercise the physic systems' solid bones on.
While the game initially launched as a single-player title, it added multiplayer lobbies shortly after release, though the arguable meat of the game is still players abilities to test themselves and express a personal style on an endless variety of tracks. Consequently, Descenders speaks to the pursuit of mastery inherent to real life extreme sports. Simply put, it is all about the "git gud." Players satisfaction is derived from truly skillful plays more than socializing or a party-like approach to gameplay design.
An Extreme Sports Smorgasbord
That's not to say that Rider's Republic will have a shallow trick system. Ubisoft will doubtlessly draw lots of lessons from their 2016 snowboarding and extreme sports title, Steep, whose deep trick system can easily overwhelm new players. That said, the E3 trailer has a distinctly anarchic, party-centric vibe to it. Ice cream truck bicycle skins, borderline sci-fi rocket-assisted wing suiting; this is a game that will appeal to gamers with an appetite for over-the-top sporting shenanigans who want to explore an expansive environment full of handcrafted opportunities for ridiculous tricks. All in all, the trailer feels like a loving invitation to a haven for Tony Hawk and SSX fans.
The net result of these two different titles is a unanimous win for all extreme sports fan. Even though Descenders and Riders republic have their own unique charms, they will likely appeal to similar audiences in different ways. And while these titles aren't in direct competition, nothing pushes the boundaries of a genre like a friendly rivalry.
Descenders is available now for PC, PlayStation 4, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.