Bike Pack - First Impressions

After racing the streets of Paradise City on two wheels for about 5 hours I must say that the Bikes are a cool addition to Paradise City. So far I've done all the Burning and Midnight rides, the 128 time road rules and about half of the online challenges. I've unlocked all the bikes and some other goodies (when I got 101%).

Some of the Burning and Midnight rides were actually quite refreshing. Some of the circuit and checkpoints races were using good routes and it is a shame that the car part of the game hasn’t got the offline (or online) races set up like this. Burning and Midnight rides are like burning routes so there are no AI bikes or cars fighting you.
 
Riding on two wheels in Paradise City is a purely solo experience offline. It’s just you, your bike and the traffic. Online you can ride with up to 7 other two wheeled friends. Cars and bikes do not mix, so it’s one or the other. To change from car to bike or bike to car online the host will have to restart the lobby. I think it would have been smoother if the host could change this without restarting.

The bikes look great and you have lots of different colours to select from. Having the choice between a male or female rider is also cool. I think most of my friends were using the female rider last night. Bikes don’t have boost and there are no takedowns. If you think wheelie donuts are awesome you can do those and I’ve also heard that it is possible to do endos.

So far I’ve done about half of the 70 challenges. There are 5 timed and 5 Freeburn challenges for each number of players. So far I have not been able to find the leader boards for the timed bike challenges but I expect these to appear soon. Can’t see any point in having timed challenges without leaderboards…. Hmmmm… actually I don’t think there will be any leader boards! You know why! Because the timed bike challenges accepts that players leave the challenge!

128 (64 day + 64 night) time road rules is a welcome addition to the game. I enjoy timed road rules and I now have 192 in total to get! So far most of my times are slower on the bike than with a car but I have not done any using the fastest bike in the game yet. I will probably redo some of my bike road rules today with the fastest bike.

There is no online racing which was really surprising and disappointing. I think that I at some point heard that Criterion Games would enable this at a later point in time. If it is in the bike pack it should be enabled now.

Unless online racing for bikes is enabled and timed challenges gets leader boards I don’t see myself spending much time in Paradise City on two wheels in the future. There is just not enough stuff to do. When all the challenges are done you will again find me cruising the streets of Paradise City in my Touge wheels.