It may not have reached the level of other popular sports, but the Red Bull X-Fighters World Tour has certainly gained something of a cult following. After all, it's now being shown on Dave. In something of a coincidence, we actually caught the tail end of one of the shows just before writing this review. It's pretty amazing (and hair raising) stuff. Pitting man and machine versus a dirt track full of ramps, lumps, and bumps, the riders who go out there risk life and limb in order to pull off the riskiest, most daring tricks they can. And in the handily monikered game of the same name, that's exactly what you'll be doing too - except without the massive insurance requirements, and risk of serious bodily harm.
A world away from how intimidating it must be to attempt to ride a bike in its real world cousin, luckily, things in the Red Bull X-Fighters game are a lot simpler than real life. Similar to fellow Xbox Live Arcade game Trials HD, in Red Bull X-Fighters, you only really have control over your bike's speed and pitch. You effectively travel in a straight line, taking in the ramps, bumps, and jumps as you find them. Trying to build up speed to get the max air on your jumps, and get yourself in the right angle for your landings, the controls are simple enough to be accessible, yet fiendishly addictive when it comes to trying to push your rider just that little bit further.
As you may imagine, most of the game modes are variations on the same theme, most of which see either racing to the end of the course as quickly as possible, getting a high score by performing tricks, or some sort of combination of the two. After finishing each event, you'll be rewarded with a certain number of new fans, and a bronze, silver, or gold medal, depending on how many points you've got (or how fast you finished). Needless to say, as with most of these sort of games, Red Bull X-Fighters has that "one more go appeal" in spades, and luckily, all you have to do is hammer "X" to take another go at the track after you've finished, or press the Back button mid-run to instantly restart. As if you needed any more encouragement, there's plenty of incentive for improving your performances here too, with new tricks, new bikes, and new outfits available to be unlocked, which in turn offer performance boosts, and help you reach the higher levels.
We're having trouble telling which way is our rider's "up" in this one.
With a somewhat disappointing twenty tricks available, several of which are locked at the beginning of the game, you'll have to start at the bottom in order to work your way up. Thankfully, pulling off tricks is a lot easier than it would be in real life. Building up a decent head of speed before the ramp, all you have to do is press one of a combination of buttons in order to pull off all variety of crazy moves. While many of the moves are fairly standard and can be easily completed, the larger, more impressive (and therefore higher scoring) moves require a pretty lengthy amount of time to complete, which is where the skill comes in. If you want the highest scoring run, you'll need to balance everything to perfection - leaning back on your bike when you can to reach the highest speed, getting the best height on the jumps, and angling your bike to land as gracefully as possible - come a cropper on your landing, either because of your positioning, or because you're still half way through a move, and you'll either fall off your bike, and lose all the points from your last jump, or lose speed, which makes it harder to pull off the fancier tricks on the next jump.
Some events even ask you pull off specific tricks, and achieve over a certain score, which can initially make things a little bit tricky. When you have to pull off a complicated move, but don't have access to a very good bike, you'll have to work much harder to get up to speed without overbalancing and toppling over, in order to get enough air on the jump to give yourself enough time to finish your move. Thankfully, when you do have to pull a specific move to pull off, the button combination you'll have to press/hold is displayed in the bottom left hand corner - especially as some of the combos can be more than a little bit tricky to pull off, with many requiring you to hold three or four buttons. In fact, one of the biggest problems we had with the game was that it's hard to access a list of tricks on the fly. Short of memorising all the button combinations (which is certainly possible, if a bit of a chore), it'd be nice to have an easily accessible list of moves - instead, it's somewhat hidden away in the menus, oddly coming under the category of "Progress".
There are two extra "World Record" modes, which see you trying to set the longest, or highest jump.
But, as you may imagine, it's in going for the best score that'll keep you coming back - if you're that sort of player. Pushing your bike and your rider as much as you can, you'll be trying to lean back as far as you can to increase your speed (running the risk of toppling over), and holding the moves for as long as you can to gain valuable points (running the risk of going splat when you land), all in an attempt to reach a gold trophy. But in a game that revolves around getting the highest score, it's more than a little bit disappointing that while there are leaderboards, there aren't any leaderboards for individual events (instead, there's a single leaderboard of "most fans"), which robs the game of what could have been yet another reason to keep playing.
If you aren't the sort of person who's phenomenally bothered about leaderboards, though, there's still plenty to see here. With a variety of events, a decent selection of courses, and plenty of "one-more-go" appeal, Red Bull X-Fighters is a worthy entry on the Xbox Live Arcade, and, if you like arcade thrills aplenty, is well worth a flutter at roughly £6.80 (800 Microsoft Points)
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
