Trials Fusion - Awesome Level Max

The Trials series has always had the same theme: "Easy to learn, difficult to master". That's been the case ever since the very first game. The series has offered fast and fun tracks with plenty of huge jumps, as well as ruthlessly difficult, technical courses.

The fast tracks can be completed by anyone, but it requires great precision to nail the best times. Alternatively, the extreme tracks are very hard to merely get through, making a high placement on the public leaderboards a task only suited for people who dedicate their life to Trials. Now the FMX mode introduced with Fusion (where you pull off crazy tricks in the air) isn't as excellently crafted as the rest of game, but even this mode has the same sense of being easy to pick up while retaining more depth for those who want to invest in it.

Additionally, the Trials series has always had its fair share of humour, mainly split into two categories. They have successful slapstick comedy in the form of the riders being brutally and comically murdered at the end of many tracks. They also have less successful oddball mirth in the form of sideline quirkiness. To begin with the developers had a thing for squirrels, and Trials Fusion is, for some reason, populated by chubby penguins.

We never quite understood the penguin thing, but then again it didn't really matter. It never got in the way of the fun or the compelling core gameplay. At least, that is, until now.

Sadly one half of the Awesome Level Max expansion breaks this golden rule. In their quest to provide something over-the-top, the developers let their attempts at being funny interfere with the gameplay mechanics, causing some of the finesse to get lost in the process. They tampered with one of the elements that make Trails great.

Let us explain. One half of this latest content drop is made up of a group of tracks called "The Awesome Adventure". In it the rider and his/her bike is transformed into a unicorn with a cat on its back, after which you're thrown into a set of crazy tracks. The tracks themselves are good, but the unicorn looks like something a fan could put together in the editor over the course of an afternoon. The animations are awful, and the magic horse is in reality nothing but a skin for the bikes you normally ride on. In itself this wouldn't have been a huge if it weren't for the fact that it messes up the gameplay.

A large portion of good Trials technique is wheel management. You need to plan and exercise your landings precisely and make use of all the torque the engine is allocating to the back wheel. It's a simple principle but one that takes a lot of practise to perfect. With the unicorn however, the wheels have been substituted for poorly animated horse legs. In reality these legs are just a skin for a wheel you can no longer see, but this makes it very difficult to execute precision landings. The end result is an "awesome adventure" that's more frustrating than epic, and to make matters worse the tracks are bound to the damn horse. This part of the DLC is almost embarrassing.

Luckily there is more. Alongside the unicorn-themed courses, Red Lynx provides an additional (and twice as large) group of tracks called "Red Lynx vs. All-Stars". The Red Lynx tracks were obviously designed by the the developers, while the All-Star track are the best fan-made creations they could find. In these tracks the ridiculous horse is kept in the stables, making it all the more enjoyable to experience a set of well-crafted courses. As a matter of fact, it'd be fair to call out the user-created tracks as the best of the bunch.

This in itself poses something of a problem, as user-generated content in the game normally comes free of charge. We're not talking about stacks of money here, but it does feel slightly wrong that we're suddenly paying for the user-created courses. In light of the vast array of free content available you could argue that checking out the highest rated contributions in "Track Central" is just as viable an option, but there's no denying that both the Red Lynx and All-Stars tracks are rather good. They're well designed and have some cool themes, and if you're a hardcore Trials fan you'll likely enjoy the selection.

That being said we thought that the extreme tracks were far too easy, and not at all in-keeping with most of the extreme tracks provided thus far. For us it's when tackling the hardest challenges that playing Trials is at its best, and thus we had hoped for more to get our teeth stuck into.

All in all it's difficult to recommend Awesome Level Max to anyone other than those who really love Trials. The part of the DLC that was supposed to be fresh and different doesn't really work, and when you consider what that leaves, this then becomes just another level pack, much like the six others already released. If you're hungry for more content by all means give it a go, but you're not missing a whole lot if you skip this one. At the same time it's still Trials Fusion, and Trials Fusion is still a bloody great game!