▼ Not recommended
0 hrs
"Bicycle Rider Simulator" would have been better suited in Early Access than a full release at this point. While it seems to be a genuine attempt at making something fun there are some issues that drag it down. They are nothing that couldn't be fixed - but then there's another specter called "suspected review manipulation" looming above all.
The game's foundation is Simple Bicycle Physics, a rock solid asset for simulating, well, bicycle physics. It's definitely okay to use it especially as a single developer because properly simulating complex physics systems is definitely hard and there's no need to reinvent the wheel. The landscapes seem to be mostly assets by NatureManufacture which is fine as well as the developer did their homework and actually built the tracks themselves.
Speaking about tracks, there are five and they are all locked except for the first. To unlock them you'll have to complete the previous track. There's also a plethora of different rider outfits and bicycle liveries to unlock but these can be purchased with "coins" which you can get simply by playing. There are no in-app purchases here.
The menus are a bit odd in that they work in the opposite direction than you might be used to. To start a ride you need to select - from bottom to top: a rider, bicycle, bicycle livery and the map, then click Start. It's rather unusual really and should in my opinion be reversed to the standard top-to-bottom reading direction but it's easy to fix.
Another bothersome thing is the translation. While the game pretends to be translated in a ton of languages they are really just Google translations - and rather poor ones at that. Some translated terms also don't fit the menu buttons properly. It's best to just switch to English which seems to be the most consistent language in terms of translation.
Even in the menus you can feel the lack of optimization. The mouse cursor is sluggish and the overall performance feels extremely low - and that's on "Low" graphics settings. This is no surprise - the menu background is from an actual game scene and has not been optimized at all. Of course this gets worse the higher you set the quality.
And of course it continues in the actual game. Even with a decent PC you'll run into chugging and this also leads to the controls becoming sluggish. Generally speaking riding the bike in this game isn't bad but with the performance issues it is certainly much harder than it should be. Visually it's okay although there seems to be no volumetric lighting here so everything looks a bit flat. The bike certainly looks great, the rider - and especially their animations - not so much.
Each track has checkpoints scattered around it and sometimes they feel a bit too far apart which can make things frustrating if you crashed due to laggy controls or sluggish asset streaming.
Based on all this, would I recommend it to someone who wants to ride a virtual bike? Too bad there's no "maybe" option on Steam - the game isn't terrible by any means and could be improved greatly with a little bit of work, namely in terms of optimizing the geometry. Once that's done it's probably worth the asking price.
Unfortunately however the developer seems to have resorted to buying Steam reviews to "promote" his game. At the time of writing there are 12 reviews and at least 10 of them are from accounts that have been involved in review manipulation before. All of them have been posted a short time after release, are direct Steam purchases, very short and written in broken english. Look at the reviews and decide for yourself - there's definitely something odd going on.
Adding that to the plethora of other issues I can't possibly recommend this game, I'm sorry.
The game's foundation is Simple Bicycle Physics, a rock solid asset for simulating, well, bicycle physics. It's definitely okay to use it especially as a single developer because properly simulating complex physics systems is definitely hard and there's no need to reinvent the wheel. The landscapes seem to be mostly assets by NatureManufacture which is fine as well as the developer did their homework and actually built the tracks themselves.
Speaking about tracks, there are five and they are all locked except for the first. To unlock them you'll have to complete the previous track. There's also a plethora of different rider outfits and bicycle liveries to unlock but these can be purchased with "coins" which you can get simply by playing. There are no in-app purchases here.
The menus are a bit odd in that they work in the opposite direction than you might be used to. To start a ride you need to select - from bottom to top: a rider, bicycle, bicycle livery and the map, then click Start. It's rather unusual really and should in my opinion be reversed to the standard top-to-bottom reading direction but it's easy to fix.
Another bothersome thing is the translation. While the game pretends to be translated in a ton of languages they are really just Google translations - and rather poor ones at that. Some translated terms also don't fit the menu buttons properly. It's best to just switch to English which seems to be the most consistent language in terms of translation.
Even in the menus you can feel the lack of optimization. The mouse cursor is sluggish and the overall performance feels extremely low - and that's on "Low" graphics settings. This is no surprise - the menu background is from an actual game scene and has not been optimized at all. Of course this gets worse the higher you set the quality.
And of course it continues in the actual game. Even with a decent PC you'll run into chugging and this also leads to the controls becoming sluggish. Generally speaking riding the bike in this game isn't bad but with the performance issues it is certainly much harder than it should be. Visually it's okay although there seems to be no volumetric lighting here so everything looks a bit flat. The bike certainly looks great, the rider - and especially their animations - not so much.
Each track has checkpoints scattered around it and sometimes they feel a bit too far apart which can make things frustrating if you crashed due to laggy controls or sluggish asset streaming.
Based on all this, would I recommend it to someone who wants to ride a virtual bike? Too bad there's no "maybe" option on Steam - the game isn't terrible by any means and could be improved greatly with a little bit of work, namely in terms of optimizing the geometry. Once that's done it's probably worth the asking price.
Unfortunately however the developer seems to have resorted to buying Steam reviews to "promote" his game. At the time of writing there are 12 reviews and at least 10 of them are from accounts that have been involved in review manipulation before. All of them have been posted a short time after release, are direct Steam purchases, very short and written in broken english. Look at the reviews and decide for yourself - there's definitely something odd going on.
Adding that to the plethora of other issues I can't possibly recommend this game, I'm sorry.
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