Rims Racing wants to do it differently

In the majority of racing games, your cars and interchangeable bicycles: you often start with a home-garden-kitchen machine and sell it as quickly as possible in order to purchase a superior variant. That tune creates a linear progression that is still entertaining, but also repeated over and over.

In that respect, Rims offers a pretty authentic experience . In fact, you actually build a bond with your motorcycle. As you race more often and tinker with the different parts, you learn more about the specific characteristics of the two-wheeler.

Especially replacing the largest and smallest parts is central to Rims . Whether you want to try out that one Aprilia shock absorber or are looking for a different, nicer chassis, in Rims you can shape your bike to taste. Later in the game you can choose to have these parts screwed onto the bike automatically, but for the first few hours you do those actions yourself. That is not only great to see, but it also shows how much work goes into building and maintaining an engine.

As if you were role-playing customizing your character’s skills and equipment, your bike takes on real meaning. Above all, it is your engine. In this way, Rims succeeds in giving meaning to the choices you make. It’s not just about choosing the best parts to put together the fastest engine. It is much more about taste, style and preference.

Balancing on two minds

It is precisely because of this approach that it is such a shame that the career mode is so weak. Each season consists of about seventy activities. Sometimes you can choose from a few types of competitions, but the majority of those activities are fixed. The thing is, you hardly get the feeling that you’re accomplishing anything—other than a bankrolled bank account. Yes, with a bit of luck you’ll unlock one of the other seven bikes, but otherwise it doesn’t matter if you finish first or third.

There are hardly any consequences, nor does the game offer rivalries with other drivers or are there other motives. Perhaps the most important shortcoming is that the difficulty level flies in all directions. For some activities you hardly have to do your best, while a little later you do not even come close to your opponents on a technical course.

Rims approaches the quality of the Ride series and offers a solid representation of motorsport.

In addition, Rims is little lenient if you mess up a race by falling three times. The parts of your motorcycle immediately suffer a lot of damage, which puts you in a dilemma: do you immediately replace all those parts, for which you probably don’t have enough money, or do you continue with a half-baked engine?

In the first case, you lose your progress of a few hours to put together a somewhat manageable engine again. In the latter case, you have virtually no chance at the next activities. This may be realistic, but the challenge offered does not lead to a fun or interesting career mode. It’s really just about building up some capital to be able to move forward. There’s not much more than that.

This detracts from the otherwise solid racing experience. Rims approaches the quality of the Ride series and offers a solid representation of motorsport. However, the artificial intelligence is quite disappointing: there is hardly any question of a fair and beautiful fight on the circuit. Your opponents have no spatial awareness and will blow you (and each other) off the track.

Where is everyone?

Rims has what it takes to attract a small but passionate group of drivers with strong multiplayer. There are some fun daily and weekly challenges, mostly about getting the fastest time on a specific track. As you may expect, you can also participate in individual competitions.

The big problem is that there is already almost no one online. You can be said to be lucky if more than twenty to thirty people have put in a time in a challenge. And during the first week after release, we haven’t been able to find a lobby to run a race. Developer RaceWard Studios may not be able to do much about this, but it is worth mentioning.Rims is therefore characterized by a discord. On the one hand, it is an authentic and uncompromising motorcycle racing game. Especially the attention to the smallest details speaks volumes. But then again, there’s little reason to keep playing Rims unless you’re already content with endless time trials with that one bike you built from scratch.

Rims Racing is now available for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 , PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X and S. A version for Nintendo Switch is planned. For this review, the game was tested on Xbox Series X.

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