![]() ![]() Riders Republic opens with a burst of cool-kid plot and setup, introducing a few characters that you can promptly forget all about, because they don’t matter even slightly. While I don’t enjoy all five career paths evenly, there is more than enough here that I do enjoy to keep me merrily bouncing around the quilt-work mash-up playground that Ubisoft has created. After settling in, I was perfectly happy to bounce between Riders’ five career tracks, engaging with whatever event caught my eye and being satisfied that I was moving the needle in the right direction. I’m not sure what internal calculus was done at Ubisoft to tilt the dynamic a little bit, but Riders Republic feels so much better. Playing through events in Steep made me feel like I was just tossing hunks of meat into an amorphous blob, watching them be absorbed but not really sure if I was accomplishing anything. I didn’t know what to focus on, and when I did lock in on one activity to enjoy, I felt like I was neglecting the others. The previous games open up so much and so quickly that I often felt as though I was failing at everything equally. Having taken runs at The Crew 2 and Steep, and having been bewildered by the formless structure of both, I didn’t expect that Riders Republic would smooth the curve as much as it has, leaving me fiending for more every time I’m forced to turn off my PlayStation 5 to do stuff like work and eat. I most emphatically did not enjoy Steep, Ubisoft’s last entry in the open-world extreme sports genre – a genre which is, in itself, an entirely Ubisoft-created invention. ![]() I am shocked at how much I enjoy Riders Republic. ![]()
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