Trials Frontier: On the minus side
Trials Frontier is a free, IAP supported game, and that means that there is some engineering towards getting you to pay. Each race costs you fuel which replenishes over time, but unless you want to wait, you’ll have to use your limited stock of gems to refuel.
This isn’t a problem in the early going where you’ll level up faster than you can use fuel, but the more you play the more costly races get, not to mention bike upgrades, wheel of fortune spins and re-rolls of the Loot Wheel to get precious components.
As IAP schemes go, it’s not exactly subtle, but then it’s also not as persistent as many. I’ve put a solid number of hours of play into Trials Frontier at this point, had a lot of fun with it, and it hasn’t cost me a cent.
ONLY ALL THE TIME.
Being a Ubisoft-published game, Uplay is front and centre, and it’s pushed pretty heavily. Again, it sits in the annoying rather than gamebreaking space.
Trials Frontier’s level design leans towards the casual, and what that means on a practical level is that individual levels are quite short and never horribly difficult. There are challenges later on that make levels trickier, but that’s not quite the same thing. What it’s done is take the skill-based game of Trials and substitute it for a game of chance, because you’ll often race very well but then be forced to retry because you didn’t spin the bike part you were after. You can get past this by paying real money… which then flicks back to the IAP problem.
Despite the soft launch, there are also still bugs. It’s weird when the folk you race against clip through the scenery, and it’s downright annoying when you crash at the end of of a race because you haven’t precisely triggered the end race flag condition. That’s a rare, but not unknown quantity, at least for the races I’ve been doing.
Next Page: Trials Frontier: Pricing and Verdict