Ride is a hard motorcycle racing sim

If you wanted to know how hard it is to drive a motorcycle, Ride is the perfect game for you.  Aside from the MotoGP series, there aren't a lot of other circuit-based motorcycle racing video games out there. It's a breath of fresh air playing Ride as car racing games usually dominate the genre.  I don't blame game publishers releasing lots of car games simply because driving a car is much easier than riding a motorcycle. If you are not used to driving a motorcycle (virtually or in real-life), I guarantee you that you will fall off and crash a lot the first time you play Ride.  Ride has three difficulty settings that change the way the game is played. There's the standard difficulty where the game's physics are more lenient towards your bad driving. The standard difficulty is "easier", but you will still fall off lots of times. The Semi-Pro and Pro difficulties are when Ride becomes a true simulator. These difficulties are where you have to shift the body weight of the rider to ensure that they get a lot of speed, and also get around corners more efficiently. The learning curve is pretty steep in Ride, but you do get the hang of things the longer you play it.  To make life easier, you do have the option of adjusting some of the driving options. There's an "auto-brake" system where the game slows down the motorcycle automatically whenever you drive too fast around a corner. Ride also takes a page out of the Forza series as you can rewind time if you crash. The rewind feature is not unlimited however as you can only go back in time up to nine times.  To get the most enjoyment out of Ride is to simply persevere and keep practicing. I crashed hundreds of times in this game and had to use the rewind feature in every race. It's brutal because one small crash or missed corner will make your rider fall off instantly. If you can master the controls, the game can get fun.  There are no real-life racers that you can play as in Ride. The only person you can be is your own created character. You can opt to play as either a male or female character. You are free to name them and even choose the country that they represent. The only sad part is that you don't see your racer much because their face is always hidden behind a helmet.  Even though Ride has no real-life racers, there are tons of legitimate motorcycles included in the game. Ride has an impressive range of over 100 different bike models for you to choose from. Not to mention they come from 14 different respected manufacturers including the likes of Suzuki, Yamaha, Kawasaki and more.  I also like the variety of game modes that Ride has. The main World Tour mode has tons of tracks and race events for you to try out. Not only is there standard races, but you can also do time trials, drag racing and even a mode where your goal is to overtake all the drivers in a specifc time limit. Ride even kindly includes splitscreen and online multiplayer modes on top of this as well.  Graphically, Ride is decent as the orignally-designed tracks all look gorgeous. The game may lack the quality of other racing titles like Forza Horizon 2 and Driveclub, but I thought the graphics overall look pretty nice. The detail on the motorcycles themselves are pretty amazing too.  The only huge flaw about Ride are the horrendously long loading times. This game might have the longest loading times I''ve ever encountered on a PS4 video game. Even after the whole game was installed onto the hard drive, the load times were still brutally lengthy. It takes ages for you to start a race, and it even takes a long time for you to get back to the main menu too! Aside from the steep learning curve and stupidly long loading times, Ride is a decent racing title. There are tons of race events for you to try out and motorcycle fans will be happy with the amount of bike models that are in this game. Overall, this game is fun if you can master its difficulty and bypass its lengthy load times.  Verdict: 8.0/10