World of Riders

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Game Details

Title: World of Riders
Developer: Kodobur Yazilim
Publisher: Kodobur Yazilim
Website: https://www.facebook.com/KodOburGame/
Genre: Racing, Sports
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Age Rating: PEGI 3
Release Date: 02/07/2019
Price: £7.19 – Rapid Reviews UK was very kindly provided with a review code for this title.

World of Riders is arcade-like motorcycle experience with multiple bikes to buy and upgrade. Try your skills in career mode through a series of 4 seasons with multiple challenges in each or try the single event option that includes endless modes and race tracks against other CPU racers.

The bikes

In World of Riders, you get to pick out of a plethora of motorcycles each with unique statistics such as top speed, acceleration, handling, and brakes.

At the very beginning of the game, you only own one bike. But, as soon as you level-up by completing challenges and events, you’ll rank-up which will unlock new bikes for you to purchase. Money can be earned through most events, races or career opportunities.

The money can be spent on upgrades for your current bike, or you could buy one of the 14 bikes, once unlocked, and you’ve saved up enough money to do so. This can take a long time as some of the unlockable bikes can cost a small fortune.

The bike models look decent, but sadly, apart from the ability to upgrade their stats, there’s no customisation whatsoever. This seems a bit of a missed opportunity here as most people enjoy the ability to customise their bikes or cars in any racing game. It’s a shame that it wasn’t included here.

Upgrades

The only things you can customise to a small extent is the ability to upgrade your bikes with different services such as tyres, brakes, ECU, and exhausts etc.

You tap the A button, and the stat is upgraded. Each time you do this, the cost for each upgrade increases, but it’s hardly a massive feature to get too excited over. On the bikes statistics, only the red areas on the 4 available stats can be upgraded. Sadly, there is not a lot of choices here.

Career mode

After you’ve selected your bike, you’re taken to the HOME menu where you have a few options.

You can select three difficulty options; Normal, Semi-Pro and Professional. Each one has little effect on the control of your bike. For example, on normal difficulty, all assists are on. However, on professional difficulty, all assists are off.

The assists affect the steering and brakes on your bikes. I’d say the best course of action here is to test them all out in the free ride mode to see which one feels better for you.

There’s a little extra incentive though if you have assists off as you’ll receive X1, X2, X4 payout after completing challenge or events. This helps you require money quickly and helps you to buy some of the more expensive bikes faster too. Underneath this option, there are three modes: career, single event and race tracks.

Career mode consists of 4 seasons with 10 challenges in each season totalling 40 challenges/events. Each one will have different objectives such as the time trial traffic events, which see you trying to get to checked flag before target time is reached. Other challenges may see you racing against other racers in a series of laps or even events that require near misses with oncoming traffic to name a few.

More will unlock as previous challenges and events are completed. Once a season is complete, you can move on to the next one. It’s a decent mode that will provide some challenge for a fair while.

Single Events

Single event has few options available such as races which give you access to 6 tracks across three themes – village, mountain, and forest. There is also a time trial mode with the same levels, but this time against the clock.

Also, there are three events in traffic mode you can play, either in endless mode, which sees you constantly driving on one of the six tracks for as long as you want. This is probably a good mode to test your driving skills, and learn how to weave between traffic.

There’s also the Time Trail mode that sees you driving through a certain number of laps to beat a target time.

And finally, you have a free ride which is very similar to the endless mode where you keep driving indefinitely.

Each of these modes that I’ve highlighted above can use one of the 3 traffic settings which are, one way, two way, and the wrong way. These affect the traffic and can be unlocked at certain levels as you rank up. These are an excellent setting to help you to learn and perfect your driving abilities.

Race track mode

The final option is Race Tracks. In this mode, you have a few options such as Race, Time Trial, Race vs Cars and free ride again.

However, in this mode, you only have access to two circuits, Track stage 1 and Track stage 2. It’s hardly the most original names they could have come up with.

Race is pretty straightforward. You have three laps, and you need to try to win. Time trail again sees you trying to complete a circuit in three laps, within the target time.

Race vs Car is about most exciting mode here as you race against a car and try and beat him within three laps. This is about the unique mode in the game, but that isn’t saying too much. Finally, free ride lets you drive around freely on two tracks.

Engine trouble

Here are few gripes I have with World of Riders;

All modes feel very similar to each other, and it makes me think that the developers ran out of any interesting ideas pretty quickly. While they all function, they are just not all that exciting to play.

View-point

You can change the viewpoints in-game to help you see things little more clearly during the more intense traffic dodging sections, but the camera has a peculiar angle. Your third-person perspective is aimed down on the bike, and it’s hard to see all that much of the track ahead of you. Plus I found the cockpit view quite disorienting too.

Graphics

Also, I found the city area graphics when it’s raining distracting as the floor mirrors things above you like buildings and lights. While it looks decent, it makes it hard to see cars on the actual road, which leads to a lot of crashes during events.

Controls

I found the controls ok, but a little twitchy, especially the turning which didn’t feel very weighty or realistic. Of course, this is a more arcade experience, but there’s something off about how the bike controls. My biggest complaint here is that acceleration is mapped to the A button.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to change the controls in the settings to ZR which is so annoying. I think it would feel better if the ZR trigger were used to accelerate. It would have felt more comfortable, in my opinion. The game also supports gyro controls, which I thought was a pleasant surprise.

But do they work well? Well, kind of. They’re overly sensitive when you turn the sensitivity all way down. As a result, making it around any of the courses is quite tricky.

However, by swapping to the normal or semi-pro driving assists, these may help you control bike little more easily. But, I wouldn’t count on this control scheme during the more challenging events. If you want to win any of the races or challenges don’t bother using it, stick with the standard control format.

And that’s World of Riders in its entirety. There is content here, but some of it feels far too similar to each other. Plus, there isn’t any multiplayer component available, which is a bit of a missed opportunity. There are things that I like, such as the wide variety of bikes, 40 career challenges, and Race vs Car mode. World of Riders doesn’t reach the highest of heights in its genre. Sadly, it becomes bogged down with too many similar modes, and there are not enough unique experiences to set it apart.

Rapid Reviews Rating

You can purchase World of Riders from the Nintendo eShop by using the following link, https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/World-Of-Riders-1591112.html#Overview