With the dirth of good games appearing on the Xbox platform for many months now, it’s great to see some people developing pick up and play titles for release as Arcade titles. These aren’t the usual run of the mill conversion of pap 8-bit games that should long have been dead and buried, they are games that have had love, attention and oodles of technical skill applied to them.

Trials HD is simple in concept. Ride a Trials bike across an obstacle course whilst not crashing. Controls are simple. Accelerate, brake, lean forward and back. That’s it. And in fact, it starts off ludicrously easy. But the difficulty ramps up fairly quickly – although never unfairly. Each level 3 achievement levels – Bronze, Silver and Gold. Early on, it’s fairly simple to get gold medals but as you progress through the difficulty bands, it become harder and harder and then, finally, nearly impossible.

At least, you’d think they were impossible to get, but there are video’s out on the internet to prove otherwise! Even if you can’t beat a particular level at the Gold standard, there’s always the challenge of beating your mates times.

Beyond the main game, which will keep you going for ages anyway – there are tonnes of silly mini games of different sorts to play with. Some truly imaginative extensions on the main game concept and they’re bound to make you laugh – as well as cry!

Beyond these skill games, there are also tournaments to take part in. These are in effect 3 or more levels from the game strung together and your overall rating is based on cumulatively how long you took to complete the levels and how many times you crashed.

And, as if all this wasn’t enough, they have also put in level editors that you can both create your own content, as well as play other peoples content across Live.

So, there’s absolutely tonnes of positive about this game. The only negatives I can think of are the fact it would have been nice to have ghost racing against your mates – or against the best times in the world. I can see how this might eliminate some of the enjoyment of finally finding out how to achieve an obstacle though. Also, the game can get frustrating. When you’ve tried to achieve a gold medal for the 500th time and come up short once more, it can lead to controller throwing and full on emotional breakdown – but the fact that as soon as you wipe away the tears and put the controller back together again, you want “just one more go” speaks volumes!

There are plenty of games selling for £40 that don’t have half the content of this game, let alone the fun. For £10 it’s expensive as an Arcade game but incredible value by any standard.

Take a look at a gameplay vid from the developers site: http://download.eu.redlynxtrials.com/video/trialshd/TrialsHD-Gameplay-FullRes.wmv