MotoTrialz Review

MotoTrialz puts you in control of a motorbike rider, forced to race his bike through grueling obstacle courses, and to suffer injuries that would kill or permanelty handicap lesser men, but due to the will of some outside, unseen entity, he must continue on until he succeeds. Or at least that's what I assume the storyline to be since there's not one given. There are 27 courses to race through, of increasing difficulty. You can only really go forward and backward, and can tilt your bike in each direction, which is necessary at times as you need to flip in midair or tilt your bike to angle yourself on a ramp properly.

MotoTrialz thankfully makes it very easy to restart from your last checkpoint - which is a necessity for this game. You will die plenty of times. The levels are often challenging, but don't really get to a point where they're exceedingly difficult to the point where the game isn't fun. Occasionally I'd put down the game after playing for a while because I got frustrated, but it wasn't enough that I was demoralized from returning in the future. The game lasts a decent amount of time, and the courses are varied and fun enough to keep coming back to it, and perfectionists can work on improving their best times, of course.

MotoTrialz's controls are occasionally problematic, especially the leaning. The slider requires you to start sliding from the center of it, and this is where having virtual controls fails - without any kind of physical point of reference from the center, I've often wound up thinking I would be leaning in a certain direction, and I wouldn't be, as I didn't slide it from the center point. It's quite annoying. The game's physics also wind up with your bike and rider occasionally getting stuck in weird places - often times these are funny things, like after you die, but sometimes you'll get inexplicably stuck on a ramp and have to reset to the last checkpoint. The app doesn't appear to support the Retina Display yet (at least on the iPod touch 4G) and doesn't support Game Center.

MotoTrialz isn't the best game ever, and the controls and features need some work, but it's a solid little game - and you could sure do worse for $0.99.