Urban Trial Tricky review for Nintendo Switch

It?s never bothered me too much that the Urban Trial games are basically dollar store knock-offs of the Trials series. Sure, they?ve possessed zero originality, but they?re always been perfectly competent stunt bike racing games that are a mindless way to pass an afternoon.

With Urban Trial Tricky, however, the series seems to have gone veering off the rails. I hate it.

The biggest problem is the grinding. There?s so, so, so much of it here. Sure, Urban Trial — and Trials games, too, if we?re being honest — have always been a little heavy on grinding, as you constantly have to go back and get more stars on levels to help upgrade your bike, but Urban Trial Tricky takes it to an obnoxious extreme. Right from the very first level, it asks you to achieve a certain total of points in order to make it to the second level, but then it fails to give you anything more than the most basic moves. Then it does it again on the second level, and the third, and so on. Opening up each new track is a massive slog, and it never gets any more enjoyable, not least because none of the tracks is that interesting to begin with.

The other big problem is right in the game?s name. Urban Trial Tricky puts a huge emphasis on tricks, to the detriment of nearly everything else. Even the time trial tracks require you to pull off tricks to get boosts, which seems kind of silly. Worse, you don?t get that many points for pulling of a lot of the tracks, so most levels are based more on quantity of tricks, which in turn makes them lose some of their lustre.

To some extent, I get it. The previous Urban Trial game, Playground, was pretty easy to blast through, since the requirements for each new level were pretty easily attained. It makes some degree of sense that, for Urban Trial Tricky, the developers would want gameplay that would encourage players to spend a little more time with the game.

But all that does, really, is make you spend more time with a game that really isn?t all that good. One thing about Urban Trial Playground that I remember pretty vividly is that I was getting pretty sick of it by the end, because it started feeling a little grind-heavy and all the levels felt the same. With Urban Trial, that feeling started to kick in somewhere around the second track. This is not an enjoyable game, and even if its predecessors didn?t set the bar all that high, Urban Trial Tricky comes nowhere close to clearing it.

Tate Multimedia provided us with a Urban Trial Tricky Switch code for review purposes.