Motorbike racing games tend to come in two different flavours. They are either completely awful or distastefully bland. Many big racing-focused studios avoid the sub-genre due to its niche appeal with four wheel-based motorsports tending to be the safer choice commercially. One developer that hasn’t shied away though is the Italian team of Milestone with their various biking titles including MotoGP and, the topic of today’s review, Ride.
I’ll be blunt about this. The original Ride was a pretty poor racing game. It functioned okay but it lacked any sort of personality. It felt more like the template to a motorsports simulator than it did the thing itself. Even with its impressive range of bikes it was hard to invest yourself in the game as it just had nothing particular going for it. Not to forget I’m saying this as an avid racing game fan. I suspect a casual consumer of the genre would have found themselves being bored from the get-go.
The simplest praise I can give Ride 2 is that it is, without doubt, far better than its predecessor. It still has its fair share of problems but Milestone really managed to tackle the blandness that plagued the series before. It now feels genuinely exciting to jump on one of the game’s over 170 bikes with them all feeling unique in their own way. With the original Ride I never saw the point in anything other than the top tier bikes, but now even the slowest two-wheelers in the game have their own rhythm.
Speaking of rhythm, Ride 2’s driving mechanics allow for a thrilling flow between corners like little else I’ve ever played. It reminds me of Forza’s drift mode and how you have to lean the car you’re in from corner to corner in order to keep momentum except here it’s fundamental to the driving experience. As your bike meanders through the track, leaning left and right, you can’t help but feel joyful. It feels so unique and, unlike the original, might be good enough to recommend Ride 2 on its own.
I’ll also openly praise the game’s impressive variety of licencing, both bike and track-wise. I was disappointed to see the absence of popular biking venues such as Mugello however the inclusion of less common circuits like Circuito de Almeria and Sportland SUGO is a very pleasant surprise. A lot of modern racing games will regurgitate the same Silverstone and Catalunya combinations so it’s nice to see a few wildcards thrown in there. It doesn’t come anywhere near the quality and diversity of Project CARS or Forza Motorsport 6 but Ride 2 does offer enough location variety to stop the racing from getting too monotonous.
In terms of development, this game is a real hit-or-miss situation. On one hand the frame rate is stellar: a consistent 60 FPS with no drops spotted in the entirety of my playing time. For a fast-paced game with tonnes of action and precise inputs, the importance of this shouldn’t be understated. However, that’s pretty much where the praise ends on this front. Ride 2 is not a particularly good looking game. That’s not to say it’s ugly either, but rather just dated by 2017’s standards.
This is a problem the original had a couple years ago and I don’t really feel they’ve improved it visually much at all. Not only are there many current-generation games that look better, but I’d go as far to say that some last-generation games like Forza Horizon do too! Most notable is the lacklustre texturing on certain bikes and most environments. Loading times are just too slow as well. The initial launch of the game takes an eternity and getting into a race can feel like an era. I’d like to say these are just annoyances that have no real impact on the gameplay but I’d be lying. They do detract from your experience because it kills your immersion. No one is going to buy Ride 2 to stare at loading screens. People want to be freely zooming around their favourites tracks having fun.
It’s a shame too that you can never really shake off the thought that the AI in this game are simply computers. They stick like glue to their racing line, often even if you are already where they want to be, and never make any particular mistakes. It does offer a nice layer of challenge since little errors are allowed but it also feels extremely artificial. Challenge as a whole is a positive though and the game does a good job of both accommodating to newcomers as well as veterans. If I did have one major complaint though it would be that bikes are pretty cheap considering how much money you get. This means even end game bikes don’t actually take all that long to acquire. This is perfectly normal for a collection-focused racing game, a formula which Gran Turismo pretty much perfected, but I would have liked to see something a little different.
The single-player experience where you’re likely to spend most of your time is decent. The World Tour system is far from innovative but works well when combined with a good bike and track variety. There is a relatively interesting ranking mechanic where you work your way up from 301st to 1st in the hierarchy. There’s actually a surprising focus of customisation with upgrading bikes pretty much being essential to finishing well in races. The upgrade system feels like it’s been ripped straight out of Forza but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It means you get a coherent and simple menu system with clear indicators on how different parts impact performance. You don’t need to be a mechanic to make sense of Ride 2’s upgrades.
Summary
Ride 2 is a huge improvement over the original and is now comparable even to the genre’s titans. It excels in feeling great to drive on and offers enough variety to keep you entertained for hours on end. Sadly slow loading times, outdated graphics and overly simplistic AI really make this game feel archaic by the standard’s we’ve come to expect. I’d say only pick this up if you’re the kind of person who can enjoy a game on its driving mechanics alone or you’re a motorbike enthusiast.
Kurt contributed 8 articles to ICXM in 2017, covering game reviews, and Xbox news with a focus on hands-on impressions and verified-source reporting. Their bylines on the site span the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @kurtjp35.