So, if you like past Ubisoft sports games at a foundational level, then you will probably like Riders Republic. That’s pretty much the story and single player progression structure in a nutshell. In true Ubisoft sports style, your ultimate goal is to win enough competitions to prove yourself worthy of participating in the grand final competition. As you get more stars, you gain access to more bonus rewards, mostly in the form of gear and money to buy cosmetics. You play different events to unlock more events and collect stars by completing events and challenges within them. There are different events split into three classes of sports: land, air, and snow.
The game works pretty much how you expect it to. I find it funny that they don’t even try to hide the roots of the game’s foundation by literally having a setting for winter sports trick landing called “Steep” mode. You even have the ability to switch the map between 2D and 3D, which basically is the difference between the maps in The Crew 2 and Steep. The map structure looks almost identical to The Crew 2 with more topography and exploration potential a la Steep. It takes the lessons they learned from Steep and The Crew 2 and mashes them together. Let me start by saying that this is very much a traditional Ubisoft sports game. But I do have some thoughts about the beta that I wanted to share. Usually I stream betas, but Ubisoft had the beta under NDA for the first few days and by the time they removed the NDA I had already done pretty much everything I wanted to and hit the beta’s character development limits, so I really wasn’t in the mood to stream it by that point.