Bike Baron Review (iOS)

Take a motorbike, put a little digital man on him, design some devious videogame levels to try to get him through and what do you get? That’s right! Kickstart on the Commodore 64! Oh, you thought I was going to say something else?

*ahem*

That’s right! Another Trials clone! I don’t care though. I don’t care about clones, or rehashes of the same game (endless runners, collect three things, whatever). The only measure of quality should be whether it is a good game, not if it is another good game of the same type. Bike Baron is an infuriatingly, annoyingly dumbfounding and addictive game. It is not, however, a good one.

It has everything you would expect. A motorbike, a rider, a feline passenger, devious courses and the ability to throw your weight backwards and forwards to aid a landing or get over an obstacle. It has ridiculous courses with a number of things to collect on them. It has a timer. It has course specific challenges that mean you’ll have to play each one multiple times to earn all 3 stars attributable to each. It has more advanced courses that unlock as you earn said stars. It has difficulty levels.

So far, so *yawn*.

The success of such a game hinges on two key elements: the physics of the bike and the deviousness of the level design. In the case of Bike Baron I can say only this – one of the hard levels requires you to purposefully force the rear wheel of the bike to clip through the scenery to get off of the starting line.

It’s a maddeningly frustrating game to play. Rather than design clever levels for a player to guide their motorised missile around, the developers appear to have come up with a handling model that can at best be described as ‘off’ and then built a game around that. Most levels outside of the upper echelons aren’t particularly difficult, more a war of attrition as you try to get the rotation of the bike and rider just right. Many solutions depend up on the player’s ability to game the system, to understand that the bike handles in a counter-intuitive manner and to bounce it across the finish line accordingly.

The challenges highlight this: complete the level without crashing, within a certain time or with all the coins collected. Yet these are often exclusive. There is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ run. Racing through a course at break neck speeds, pulling off the manoeuvres your muscles have now memorised means you’ll be floating over them. Pausing to get them all results in crashes (inconsequential, they at least learned the instant restart is a key feature, not a nice to have) and longer times.

It’s all just so workman like. So uninspired and tepid.

Why, then, am I struggling to tell you to run for the hills, to dodge this over-hyped, over-reviewed monstrosity of a game that doesn’t deserve your time?

In short, there’s something amazingly charming about how inadequate it is. None of the levels are brilliantly designed masterpieces of physics based puzzling; they’re just a bit half arsed and tricky to beat. The bike isn’t a wonderful central vehicle that responds perfectly to an expert player’s skills; it’s wonky and rubbish and does things it shouldn’t really do. The challenges aren’t, well, particularly challenging in the main; unlocking every level and beating all 3 is pretty easy for ¾ of the time you’ll spend playing it.

Yet it manages to be a game that’s more than the sum of its parts. Whether it’s the comedy “oohs” and “aahs” as you make a jump (almost as endearing as Whale Trails “I can see my house from here”), or that instant reset just one more go hook that it manages to sink, I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that I continued to play it long past the point where I decided it was a bit shit and still want to go back and take on those stupid, stupid Extreme levels and beat them. In a world where it’s so easy to quit, hold, delete any title that fails to meet our lofty expectations, I count that as a success.

You can buy Bike Baron now on iOS for 69p.