Trials HD is not a game made exclusively for the folks who love MX vs. ATV, wear Fox-branded clothing, and know all about what the "cc" means on a dirt bike engine. Sure, the game involves dirt bikes, and yes, it certainly involves jumps, but this is far from a game made for biking enthusiasts. Trials HD isn't about racing -- though time trials certainly play a role -- but instead gives you the simple goal of reaching a finish line. I'm sure that sounds easy enough, but with Trials, the name says its all, and you'll quickly learn that getting to the end of a stage will push you to the limits of your abilities (and patience).

It's easy to think of Trials as a game akin to Excitebike, but I think it has much more in common with something like Donkey Kong Country or Braid. Like the platformers I've just named, Trials consists of a series of levels, each filled with obstacles you have to overcome -- several of which will kill your virtual biker or cause him serious harm. To get past these, you'll rely on raw hand-eye coordination, and your knowledge of the game's physics -- using your rider's weight to tilt the bike forward or backward, and hitting the brakes or gas just right. The levels become increasingly difficult as the game progresses; by the time you reach the expert levels, the stunts will seem nigh impossible... at least, that is, until you figure them out and feel like a badass for doing so.



And, really, it's the challenge that makes Trials so damn fun. Lots of games are brutally difficult -- but Trials breaks the levels up into a series of checkpointed stunts. For instance, you might come to a sheer wall that looks impossible to get past, but -- after 20 or so painstaking tries -- you'll eventually surmount it and immediately hit a convenient checkpoint that marks the start of a whole new stunt. It's almost more apt to think of the later levels of Trials as a series of levels within a level, because I promise that when you even get past the first part of the final stage, you'll feel the same sense of accomplishment that you did upon finishing an entire level on medium difficulty. I'm not always the most patient person with games that require a lot of trial-and-error, but Trials never felt punishing, thanks to the superb level of control it put in my hands -- I always knew it was really my fault when I screwed up.

On many occasions, you'll make more attempts than you'll care to remember, but thankfully, Trials makes the repetition an easy pill to swallow: You can return to the latest checkpoint -- or the start of a level -- at the touch of a button, without any loading or downtime. One of my problems with this: While I like the option to quickly restart a level, it's mapped to the Back button -- and I accidentally hit it on multiple occasions when I was furiously moving my thumbs around during a particularly tough portion of a level. In my exasperation, I couldn't help but wonder why the game had no quick "are you sure?" screen. My other problem is that you're given 30 minutes or 500 faults (each fall, death, or checkpoint-reset counts as a fault) to complete a level, and the final levels are so difficult that I did hit these limits. Thirty minutes and 500 faults is a lot... but at the point, any limit seems pretty arbitrary. I'm not out to prove to the world that I beat those final stages within a certain time or with only a certain amount of faults -- I'd just like to say that I beat them, period. So yes, I'm a little irritated that the game only lets you have 500 tries per level. It's that tough.

Even if you get past all the levels, Trials still has a lot to offer. If you're the type that cares, you can play through levels repeatedly to improve your time and place higher on the leaderboards, or you can jump into tournaments that competitively rank your ability to one-shot a series of stages. If that doesn't sound like your thing, you can play through the unlockable Skill Games, where you can participate in a how-long-can-you-go steel ball challenge, or see just how far you can pull bombs behind you without jostling them too much. These games aren't that great on their own, but they serve as fun palate-cleansers when you need a break from the regular game.



If you manage to demolish all the tracks, challenges, and Skill Games, you can still lose hours to Trials if you're the type who likes to create original content. Trials includes a simple level editor that allows you to create and test tracks that you and your friends can play. It's a great addition, and could allow for some awesome user-created content, but it's marred by what I feel is a fatal flaw: You can only share and receive levels with people on your friends list. Having something more akin to LittleBigPlanet -- where players could share their levels with the community at large -- makes so much more sense, and would result in a hell of a lot more user-made levels. I mean, the editor is awesome... but I can't see that many people putting the time and effort into creating levels that only their very small group of friends will get to enjoy.

It'd be so easy to overlook Trials HD, because you see the biker character and think that you're not really into that kind of game, but this is a case where you really can't get a feel for what the game is about by simply looking at screens. If you love physics puzzlers -- and, more importantly, don't mind one helluva challenge -- I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better option on XBLA.