Uphill Rush 2

 

Alternative sports. Skating, BMX, Trials and so on. Enormous fun to watch, but a very daunting prospect should you actually choose to partake. With a high risk of injury to balance the huge adrenaline rush you gain from putting your human form in physical danger, it's no wonder that some of us here at SquareGo would much rather play games like SKATE 2 then, say, throw themselves off the roof of a house on a skateboard.

It's just much safer really.

The interweb is also a great haven for extreme sports simulations, most notably the Trials phenomenon. Since the original Trials Bike sailed into view, flash game sites have been flooded with a huge amount of spin-off's and rip-off's, all intended to leech some of that precious (and no doubt very large) audience that the original has claimed since its inception. And the latest of these is Uphill Rush 2, a game that touts day-glo, happy visuals and, umm, scooters?

We don't know about you, but flying around on a scooter doesn't have half the charm as pulling a no hander superman on a proper motocross bike. And while you can unlock these bikes later on, the levels themselves will try very hard to stop you doing so. And sadly not in the standard 'difficulty curve' way. Let us elaborate.

When creating a Trials map, very careful care and attention has to be put into whether the player can successfully traverse the course without running into any bumps, gaps or glitches that unfairly rob him of one of his lives. And it seems that process was missed in Uphill Rush 2, because we found ourselves flying off course and randomly falling off the bike many, many times. And when you only have four lives to complete three races with this means racing quickly becomes a chore, with multiple restarts needed to complete each cup. And that's just on easy!

Sure, there are checkpoints littered across the maps in order to make your journey more painless, but there are problems here also. In race mode, you take on an opponent in a first-to-the-finish speed test. However, if you are unlucky enough to lose and restart at the checkpoint, you will notice that your opponent will overtake you quickly, having somehow gained a lot more momentum than you. This means that most of the time you have to restart unless you are lucky enough to get a speed boost off the line, which seems erratic at best to earn.

There are numerous customisation options and unlocks, and it is overall a fairly pretty game but it's guaranteed that you will get bored of the actual gameplay before you get to appreciate the details. And in the world of flash games, a short attention span needs to be satisfied quickly in order to guarantee long term playing. And Uphill Rush 2 does not fulfill that goal.

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Under the previous scoring system (before 09/09/09) this game received a four.