VG Mad

Chaos Ride

System: PC
Developer: Scott Games
Publisher: Scott Games

09 Feb 2015

Based in a futuristic world, bike racing has transformed to take place in magnetic tubes, where riders can reach speeds of up to 800 Mph.

There are nine locations to race in, with 5 race types per location (Practice, Race, Eliminator, Survival, and Marathon). If you include all locations being in reverse too, this gives a total of 90 races, providing a good few hours of gameplay.

The tracks have a rollercoaster feel to them, bending, twisting, ascending, descending, all across some stunning scenery.

When you go into your first race, the track has it’s optimal route marked out for you. This will help you to learn where to place your bike, on the bends and slopes, to retain optimal speed.

Everytime you finish a race in first place, you unlock another event. You must finish first to unlock all events. You only have to complete four events per location, which is all of them, if you don’t count practice as an event.

It’s certainly worth going to the practice event, for every location you unlock, to have a better chance of learning the optimal route before committing to a race populated with opposition. This will certainly save you having to frequently retry events, and believe me, you will be doing a lot of retrying, as this game is really challenging for the first few dozen goes and beyond.

After winning an event, you also get an upgrade token, this can be used to customise your bike. Customisation includes, top speed, steering, weight, and turbo. Here you may also change your bike neon colour, at no cost.

Getting the right customisation balance can make a real difference on some tracks. For example, a track with a lot of ascending, you will want to reduce the bike weight to combat gravity.

The hud is placed on the steering column, a good place as it’s not far for your eyes to travel. Unfortunately, I found the text a little hard to glance at, while travelling at insane speeds.

All bikes give of a neon light trail when you get close enough. This is an extremely necessary nice touch as without this, at such high speeds, there is absolutely no way you would see the AI bikes, and end up hitting them instead.

Now for those that miss local multiplayer racing games, Chaos Rider has you covered. Up to 4 player split screen is supported.

There is a very minor sound glitch, at the start of a race, in that it takes a second or two, before you are able to hear your motor. You soon get used to this though, as you will also get used to the very dated, futuristic robotic female voice.

The only annoying things to the game for me, is being shunted in back, as it causes the bike and view to act weird, taking the focus away from the race line. The other annoyance, also collision related, it the unrealistic slow down when involved in a side swipe, the bike acts more like you just collided into the back of someone.

Chaos Rider is a game you will only play for an hour or two at a time, with or without friends. Think of it as a mash up of F-Zero, Wipeout, and Cool Runnings (sorry, I mean Bob Sledding).