Ubisoft has plenty of well-known franchises, like Rainbow Six, Assassin's Creed, Rayman, and Splinter Cell, but Trials has to be my favorite. With one of my favorite games of all time and a title I've really warmed up to in recent years.

At release, I considered Trials Rising the weakest in the franchise. However, after over 750 hours, I would consider it in my top three of the series, along with Fusion and Evolution. It's a phenomenally designed game despite some faults regarding the hardcore community. It retains everything that makes Trials great, has many improvements, and pushes the player to greatness like no other title in the series.

What Makes Trials Rising Great

Higher And Higher

The reason why all the Trials games are phenomenal also applies to Trials Rising. The central theme of Trials Evolution is called "Higher," and that's what it's all about: going higher and higher in skill level to seemingly endless heights. You'll want to get all the gold medals first, then go for platinum, and after that, diamond. Then you can try to beat all the challenges, get world records, or go to Trials famous Track Central, where a host of incredible community-created tracks are available.

Ubisoft often reserves criticism for its big gameplay problem, where the title loses its luster after many hours of play. Trials Rising does not have that problem. It's easy to learn but hard to master, and there's always more stuff to improve upon for yourself.

A huge change to Trials Rising was the tutorials, which are leagues ahead of prior games. At release, I didn't really need them as I was already pretty highly skilled and ended up needing Ninja University more than anything. However, from other players' reactions, they were incredibly helpful to beginners. Trials Rising has a bunch of improvements to the Trials formula, but also some big negatives.

Improvements And Negatives To Trials Rising

Hardcore Players Were Not Happy

Right off the bat, a massive improvement to Trials Rising that everyone will agree on is the bike variety. Prior games had okay bike variety, but you really only pick between a couple. Trials Rising, however, has a grand total of 13 bikes. There are so many ways to spice up the gameplay now. For the first time ever, Trials Rising has bike-specific leaderboards. Trials has always encouraged you to do stuff like beating an extreme track with a sub-par bike via challenges, but now there's more incentive than ever due to these new leaderboards.

For people familiar with the Trials community, you may wonder why I love this game so much. The consensus is not positive, and while it's understandable, I think it's unfair to this Ubisoft game in hindsight. Simply put, Trials Rising changed the series' physics dramatically, with a large sticking point being the magnetic wheels. The new physics work great for the developer-made levels, as they were designed around them. However, for the custom track community, it was a rude awakening.

After Trials Rising came out, many fans migrated back to Trials Fusion. To this day, Fusion remains the most actively played Trials game in the community.

So many high-level Ninja mechanics that were staples in custom tracks for Trials Fusion were wrecked beyond repair with these new physics. Backwheel-only tracks, for example, were ruined in this game because the magnetic wheels are so effective that your front wheel can with the ground without it even hitting the floor. This is a fair criticism, as the community keeps these games alive like Doom. However, I still argue that the core levels remain phenomenally made with the new physics in mind, and the magnetic wheels were quite satisfying compared to older titles.

The biggest improvement to Trials Rising and what I respect most about this game is how much it pushes the player. For the first time, a new medal type was introduced. In prior games, the platinum medal was the highest you could get, but in Rising, there exists a diamond medal. These are for the elite, of the elite. Diamonds are so hard to get that under 150 players have achieved them on certain levels. It's awesome for RedLynx to include a feature like this for top-level players, but they went even further.

Not many other developers would put in rewards like this for the top 0.1% of players for a mainly single-player game.

Ninja tracks are now fully incorporated into the base game, and they're some of the hardest levels ever put into an officially released title. Completing them doesn't just give you bragging rights and a spot on the leaderboards, as you get cool cosmetics like a Red Ninja Helmet for completing the hardest levels. You also unlock Ninja challenges, giving a fresh, brutal way to play some of the easier tracks.

Beating all the Ninja tracks, including Black Belt, unlock more challenges. It's sweet to not only get a Red Ninja outfit reward for beating all the levels but an additional Black Ninja outfit reward for completing all the challenges. Not many other developers would put in rewards like this for the top 0.1% of players for a mainly single-player game. The hardest track, Black Belt, was a journey for me, and beating it is my biggest accomplishment in gaming.

Black Belt Was My Gaming Mount Everest

One Of Only 284

I've spent over 750 hours in Trials Rising, and a good chunk of that time was grinding out Black Belt, possibly the hardest level ever put into a game by a big publisher. Only 284 players have beaten this track as of writing, and some s are duplicates on different platforms, so under 280 total. That number may seem big, but under 280 is absurdly wild coming from a major Ubisoft title. This level 5 Ninja track alone took me hundreds of hours of practice until I beat it.

I used the Black Belt practice track in Track Central, where you can skip checkpoints. Usually, after beating every checkpoint individually without faulting, I managed to beat the track shortly after. I did that with Blue Belt, but after beating every checkpoint individually on Black Belt, I wasn't even halfway done. The problem that makes Black Belt so incredibly hard is the 30-minute timer. Some of the checkpoints on this level are so inconsistent, require such precise movement, and take long enough on their own that clearing all 12 in under 30 minutes is a Herculean task.

You may notice in my Black Belt run that I immediately restart the checkpoint upon reaching a new one. That's because I'm trying to set up the approach for the next perfectly, and I don't care about faults. I want to do it fast to make it within 30 minutes. Nobody is going to fail this track because they have over 500 faults. You'll always fail because of the time limit, and the track's designed so that you're almost guaranteed to get a gold medal if you manage to beat it.

Black Belt was a wild grind for me, but after spending hundreds of hours, I managed to finally beat it on my second try on the morning of August 15, 2024. It was a magical moment for me, knowing that I had conquered this seemingly impossible task that so few have been able to do. It felt like conquering Mount Everest to me as a gamer, and it's all thanks to RedLynx, who put such a ridiculously hard track into this game that most other devs wouldn't include.

Trials Rising had that powerful effect on me.

That moment, for me, highlights what makes video games special. Yes, video games are an art form, and they can tell great stories, but there's one thing that's special to them: you can accomplish something. Only in video games can you cry after setting a 120-star world record in Super Mario 64, earning a million dollars from being a Street Fighter 6 world champion, or becoming the first person to beat the hardest levels in Geometry Dash.

Trials Rising had that powerful effect on me. Making these wildly hard tracks and challenges pushed me to my limits more than any other game I've played, and the satisfaction couldn't be higher. Trials Rising will always have a special place in my heart.

Source: Kaiser Ryu/YouTube