But if you want to use those goggles at all times, you have to go into each of the individual sports gear menus and change the goggles manually. That’s nice because you just go to the snowboarding costume menu and change the goggles. Say you buy new goggles that you want to use only for snowboarding. While this seems obvious, it means that you have to take the time to go into the gear menu and change your clothing for each sport every time you get a new piece of gear. Meaning what you wear when biking is different from what you wear when skiing. Something I found both nice and a bit annoying at the same time is the fact that you set your gear manually for each sport. So you have to keep checking back every day until something you like appears. The problem is that it’s pretty expensive, both with in game currency and paid currency, and, at least during the beta, there isn’t too much available in the store at one time. The diversity of gear on the other hand is very nice. Not that it matters much, since you will most likely be wearing some sort of face covering at all times, but it is worth noting that the character creation tool pales in comparison to past Ubisoft games such as Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, which didn’t even have that impressive of a character creator itself. While I appreciated the ability to customize my character’s appearance via clothing in a number of ways, the character creator was severely lacking. It looks good and it runs pretty much fine, even in multiplayer. I didn’t experience any game breaking glitches or unexpected closures of the app. To clarify, I ran the game on a desktop PC with a GTX1080 GPU and 32GB of DDR4 RAM. It didn’t break the game but is does affect your position in a racing scenario. The game runs mostly smoothly but I did have multiple instances of the game freezing for a couple seconds. They built a cool map and they encourage you to explore it by including multiple motivators such as collectibles, points for discovering new areas, hidden challenges, and so on. It’s really nice that they provided you multiple ways to travel around, without making use of the fast travel mechanic which also works very well. There’s a lot of diversity in the landscapes with an open world map that contains multiple biomes. 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.
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