Game Review: Furious Bikers (Nintendo Switch)

When I first heard of Furious Bikers and was told it was like Electronic Arts’ Road Rash series from the 1990, I eagerly loaded this up, being a big fan of those games in my younger days so what did I think?

The game has you racing over 30 tracks, getting the best position you can, in order to earn a trophy and unlock the next track. The races are set in a number of settings, including mountains, desert, beach, and city.

When the first track start, you will notice straight away that you start WAY behind the starting position while the other racers get to start on the other side of the starting line. Being used to using R1 on controllers on modern machines to accelerate, it took some going to get used to the idea of using A to accelerate again, but this is because the shoulder buttons on your controller are used to punch or kick in a specific direction.

The gameplay mechanics are a bit of a joke. Your maximum speed seems to me 180MPH and there are no gears and the only way to go faster is either collect enough nitro to use your nitro jets or drive over a turbo pad, both of which will give you a temporary boost of speed. Even on a modern machine like the Switch, the speed you go seems like the speed on a Sega Saturn racing game!

As in any racing game, you have to get past your opponents, the number of which vary in each race and as mentioned before, you can kick or punch your opponents, but in this game, what’s the point – when you kick or punch them, there is barely any effect on them (although when they do the same to you, it can slow you down). Unlike Road Rash, you can’t knock your opponents off their bikes, nor can they do the same to you. The main thing that affects you during game play are the banana skins that seem to litter the racetrack and it’s these that can mean the difference between defeat and victory – just touching one can slow you down enough to take you back to the end of the rankings. Typically, the bananas don’t affect your opponents and it seems they are placed back where they were each lap.

The races however, aren’t entirely fair as your opponents are not affected by anything that happens and appears to have unlimited turbo speed. The smaller tracks are near impossible to win unless you build up your nitro and use that and the turbo pads and not touch banana peels.

During the race, you can collect coins which you can spend on different colours to your bike and what looks like two different bikes. However, I spent most of my coins on different colours before finding out there were different bikes though. Thankfully, you can repeat a race and try and collect more and more coins so you’re not limited to one time only races to get them. However, besides from the colour, you don’t seem to be able to select the new bikes and there doesn’t seem to be any speed advantage to using them.

As the game goes on, you unlock ‘feat achievements’ for some events, like collecting 500 coins, playing your first race, kicking or punching someone so many times. When you get these, it appears to give you a trophy but no reward like coins. You can see your feats and how far you have to go to gain another achievement via the main menu.

The graphics have a retro feel to them, with a mix of pixelated graphics and text while also having cel-shaded backgrounds, both of which look good. The game features a music track along with soun effects which are good and you can adjust the volume of these.

There appears to be a bug in the game, which is present in all versions – after you finish a race, it tells you Best Postion but a lot of the time, it shows a position in which you didn’t spend much time of the race in. It’s not good, especially if you want to know your best placement in the race and try to improve yourself in it.

I really wanted to enjoy this game, but I was getting more and more Furious with it the more it kept cheating me out of winning a race. There are a few goos points to the game, like the graphics and sound and it controls well, plus the price is good (£3.99) but there is nothing I can say to recommend the game to anyone.

3/10

The copy of Furious Bikers used for this review was kindly provided by Ratalaika Games.

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