Blightedimp

Let's get the good things out there first, the game looks beautiful, the campaign is the best in the series and the track list is really solid. Now with that said overall I am very unimpressed with the game. My biggest issue is the AI, AI players feel like they've come from a ps2 era game, hell even gran turismo on the ps1 had better feeling AI than this game. Some tracks they are just completely incompetent and I'm able to get a 10 second lead after just a few corners, anything with a long sweeping corner they loose several seconds as they awkwardly try and manage their speed yet in the straights and off the line you will almost always be at a disadvantage so the actual difficulty is down to their behavior and the track this makes some race's a complete cake walk even if the highest difficulty settings and others do difficult you have to drop the difficulty or just be left in the dust. There isn't strong rubberbanding which is nice, instead the lead AI will just gap the pack immediately and go off into his own race, I've had 3 lap races where the gap between myself and 1st is 10 seconds and then the next AI is over 40 seconds behind me and all of this makes the game feel unbalanced and robotic. Next is the sound design, the music menus and road noises are all great but some of the bike noises are just so awful that I actually had to turn the sound off when using certain bikes. The best example I can give is the KTM 390 RC it sounds like an uninspired biplane with a cold. Overall I'm very underwhelmed with the game with bikes being locked behind the campaign (which would be fine if the AI was up to par) the game just feels like a rushed out mess and is just overall worse than its predecessor (Ride 2). When I'm playing a time attack with one of the bikes that has good sound design its great but the rest of the time I feel like I'm just tolerating the game rather than enjoying it.