Trials Evolution

With typical RedLynx humour, hosts can also choose whether to enable bailouts during the race – something that occasionally provides a finishing line advantage, but more often than not leads to hilarious blind panic as everyone follows suit in pursuit of a perceived advantage.

Your competitive nature can also be laid out in raw vindictiveness. Via the Stats screen, you can set a friend as a rival, making it easier to compare your achievements. Pressing A brings up a whole raft of stats comparing your times played, rider deaths, distances driven, and squirrels collected. Yes, squirrels.

The cash earned from both single-player and multiplayers games is used to customise your ride and racer. While improvements to this area have evolved less than in other areas of the game, it goes deeper than mere palette swaps. There should be enough distinct items in the wardrobe to give your rider a flavour of uniqueness - at least on your Friends leaderboard.

It's far too tempting to rush headlong into a spoiler account of every track - but you would hate me for it, and I'd feel terrible doing so. Suffice to say that as well as a wide range of unique and compelling courses (around 60 at launch), the game also features recognizable nods to RedLynx's indie-done-good contemporaries. Each one will delight you.

A personal highlight of the day - and a firm favourite amongst the attendant press -was Mindbender, a track crafted from pure wickedness. In the vein of the more experimental tracks from Trials HD such as Space Station, camera trickery is combined with delicate tinkering of platform physics to switch up with down, along with the suspension or reversal of gravity. It's an audacious addition to the game - a visual tongue-twister that invokes a bewildering sensation.

Way of the Ninja will likely be the track that tests the mettle of the most accomplished players. A figure-of-eight course littered with explosives, wheel-width platforms and troublesome checkpoints, it's not just the largest but also the trickiest course to date. Undoubtedly, it's the track that will sort the men from the boys in the battle for control of the leaderboards.

This addition of circular depth to the game is put to breathtaking use throughout Trials Evolution, whether you've just barreled down the drop of a rollercoaster course before gently curving around a perpendicular hillside, or simply circling an oilrig. It's an open, unobtrusive addition to the purity of the series and beautiful to boot, opening up the world from a cherished - but rather stuffily dry - warehouse to a complete 3D space.

It's put to mischievous use in one track that winds ever tighter around itself. With no opportunity to reach maximum speed, it's all about nudging yourself into the next obstacle. Rest assured that the camera takes on all of the work for this new depth, rather than adding to the fiddly manoeuvring.

Despite the demanding expanse of this new exterior playground, the visual effects have also been cranked up to a significant degree. Landmines detonate in the water with particulate splendor, and smoke effects are equally impressive.

The exterior environments also allow for a refreshing change of ambience. There are dark, foggy, forest crawls where a blood-red sun sets in the distance and wolves howl mournfully, along with breathtaking downhill rushes past rolling fields that culminate in a refreshing splash of river water.

These water physics provide an additional challenge to the game. As you land from a dramatic cliff edge onto half-submerged logs, they lurch in the water as you frantically bob and weave in an attempt to maintain balance, while trying to execute the most economic transition to the next devilishly placed water feature.