REVIEW – I think RIDE 3 is one of the best Milestone games since WRC 3 (which came out six years ago), maybe except Gravel. Sure, it could have been a bit better, but it’s miles ahead of MotoGP 18, and perhaps the Italian team would be better off by not making licensed games.

With the change to Unreal Engine 4, Milestone finally made the complete move from its own, outdated, proprietary engine to Epic Games’, and with it, we can expect a significant step ahead from the devs. RIDE 3 might be its first step in a longer process.

I

After the usual tutorial race, you can create your character, but there might be not enough presets (if I remember correctly, five per head, beard, and hairstyle?), although there shouldn’t be an option to change your „home” clothes. Still, we will get significant freedom, and even „go to school” – upon completing all tests to gold (beating your rival without running into him, or beating the set times, both without going off track), as well as completing a category’s subcategory (or magazine as it is called in RIDE 3), gives you an extra bike. I had a somewhat lucky situation, as I had all three DLC for the game (I think that’s a little ridiculous…), which meant I had several bikes outright for several categories, and most of them (with exceptions like R7 bikes) can be upgraded, too.

There are multiple categories (superbike, supersport, naked, supermoto), and the bikes all have their unique PP rating, which limits you from using them all the time (for example, there’s one race where you can only use bikes between 300 and 400 PP), but I think some of them got overrated, which meant I picked a different one that I souped up to use on the next race (which could be held even at night or in the rain, too). Speaking of upgrading, I don’t want to go into detail because of time constraints, so I’ll just say that from engine to gearbox, wheel rims, and tires, as well as optical tuning, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea if each category and bikes have the same tuning options and costs.

II

Between races, you’ll even find drag events, which didn’t work out for me at all (I always ended up accelerating too much in first gear), but the rest are alright, although the time trials (complete a lap/sector under said time, with gold, silver, and bronze ratings, which apply to races, too, and these will define the amount of reputation and credits you’ll get, which might be a problem…?) could have been more present than what they are right now in RIDE 3. At the top of the second page, I need to point out that the difficulty might have spikes. Don’t tell me that one riding school event was completed on gold for the first time, while the next one needed twenty-six tries, and during those, I ran 24 seconds flat, the time limit required to beat to get gold, in a row. I noticed the same thing at races: at a few events, the AI seems to be quite good (and you can set its difficulty up by percentage, and the usual helping options, such as the rewind, braking help, and trajectory, are all present as well), and at other races, they just felt ridiculously slow. It’s weird!

Graphically, the game looks alright to me, and it also seems to run on sixty frames per second framerate on PlayStation 4 Pro, which is what we SHOULD expect at the end of 2018! There’s also no texture loading in front of us either, which is one of the Unreal Engine’s issues. Sounds are okay, but the music, which isn’t present during races, felt average. The bikes, though, they sound different and powerful! The physics also felt alright, and now, I noticed that you have to turn early to take turns accurately, or you’ll just „understeer” no matter how hard you try. Not bad, Milestone!

III

So while RIDE 3 won’t get an 8 out of 10, I believe it deserves a kind-hearted 7.5, and I give this rating blindly without any other publications – I don’t even know what other sites rated the game, because, as I said, I wrote this in a rapid pace. The online might not die as fast as in other Milestone games, but offline, it’s packed with content to the brim, but the AI’s weird „waves” between easy and hard, the easy grinding (repeating events won’t give you a limited amount of reputation or credits), and the unbalanced tuning system is why RIDE gets a 7.5/10. After RIDE 1 and 2, I’m happy to see that after Gravel, I saw another okay game from the Italian devs. After The Council and Darksiders 3, I’ll probably come back to play the game a bit more, because I want to ride in Tenerife or Finland at 280 km/h again.

-V-

Publisher: Milestone

Developer: Milestone

Genre: Simulation, Driving/Racing

Release date: November 30, 2018