izigame.me

I've sunk 32 hours into this game so far, and it's given me enough time to really express how disappointed I am with Milestone's 5th attempt to iron out this series.
I'll start this off with a list of bugs, glitches, and general gripes I have with this game:
1. If you use rewind during an endurance race, you've pretty much broken it, and the race will never end.
2. Replays after qualifying and after a race with a qualifying session don't work.
3. When track lights turn on at dusk, the entire game stutters down to single digit frames before recovering. If you're in the middle of a turn when this happens, good luck.
4. AI bikes are so loud, you can't hear yours if you're in a pack...which you will be for every career race since you always start 10th if there's no qualifying session. There's no option to change this in audio settings.
5. "Rival" NPC's are obviously overpowered, and will perform 2-3 seconds faster than anyone else on track, including you on the same bike. Sometimes, if they group together, there will be a 6-7 second gap between the rivals group, and the rest of the pack.
6. AI bikes still do not detect the player at all, and will ride through you. Even if you crash, the AI will keep turning into your riderless bike until it disappears, with no attempt to avoid it. This is exacerbated by the fact that you will always start 10th in career races that don't have a qualifying session.
7. AI difficulty is wildly inconsistent. I'm a top 10 leaderboard rider in Ride 4. At Road Atlanta, I can barely keep up at 70% difficulty. At VIR, i'm 4 seconds ahead by turn 3 at 120%.
8. Resolution scaling is broken. 50%-200% provides no change.
9. Turning off motion blur still creates ghosting, just as it did in Ride 4.
10. The "warbling" engine sound when in the mid-range of the powerband is still there from Ride 4.
11. In order to obtain multiple liveries for a bike, you now must buy the bike in that livery. Bike affinity no longer grants this. If you're gifted a bike in a livery you don't like, too bad because...
12. You still cannot get rid of gifted bikes. If you don't want multiples of the same bike in your garage, too bad.
13. The rear brake is now useless at any lean angle. You can no longer use it to adjust your line in a corner. It only aids in straight line braking. Mash it to 100% at max lean, and the bike does nothing.
14. The menu navigation has been changed for the worse. In career mode but just want to turn a few laps on your own? You have to back all the way out to the main menu, and then change the mode. Some menu selections also make no sense. Sometimes you press "A" to select something, sometimes you press "Start". Was that really necessary?
15. The "career" mode locks your progress to a linear set of races. You cannot progress at your leisure like in Ride 4 by choosing what types of bikes you'd like to race. You must race the bikes it tells you to in order to progress to the next set of races. Want to race 600cc bikes? You'll have to race 1960's 500cc's first to unlock them. Don't want to race endurance races too early in your career? Too bad, you're racing them by your 5th set of races, and you're not going to race anything else until they're done.
16. The "career" progression makes no sense. The game tries to paint this picture of an up and coming rider just starting out and trying to make a name for themselves, but you're globetrotting around the planet from the get go. Rather than starting off in your desired region, and then unlocking races in different regions like in Ride 4. It just makes no sense.
17. The narration is abysmal and cannot be skipped. This includes "rival" introductions before some races. If you have to restart the race for any reason, you're getting the un-skippable intro every time.
18. The track selections for some of the races make no sense. 1000cc bikes on a tiny twisty track is not really that enjoyable. The bikes are heavy, hard to change direction quickly, and you never get out of 2nd or 3rd gear.
19. Finally, bike handling has changed dramatically. While in and of itself not a bad thing, there are some definite odditites that now exist. The bikes are defininitely more difficult to turn, and have too much grip, especially on corner exit. It is now VERY difficult to high side. You have to intentionally slam the throttle wide open in 1st or 2nd on a 1000cc bike in order to get any rear tire slippage. Braking is...ok, but seems somewhat inconsistent. Sometimes you can brake deep into a turn, sometimes you can't even breathe on the brake lever. The bikes also seem to headshake VERY easiily, and recovering from it is near impoissible unless you stand the bike up and ruin your race. Maybe steering dampers should be an adjustable setting?
20. They've removed some enjoyable entry level bikes (KTM 390, Honda CBR300, etc.) for some reason. These would be great introductory bikes for those small twisty circuits early in your career. No idea why these were removed...
Well, there you go. These are just mine and some of the reported issues with Ride 5. You may be able to over-look all of these things and have an enjoyable experience. If so, that's great and I'm glad you're having fun! But for me, having dumped so much into this franchise, I was expecting an improvement on what was probably Milestone's best attempt at a true motorcycle racing experience to date (Ride 4). But instead, they decided to remove some of the things that made that game good (open career progression, satisfactory bike handling, good UI), and introduced others that add no value (narration, rivals, etc. See list above).
The game still looks pretty good, and runs well on my hardware, so I'll still keep playing it despite the list above. They've added some new tracks that are a worthwhile addition (Autopolis and Le Mans especially). The bikes still look amazing, and turning laps is still an fun way to burn some time. However, the races are simply rage inducing (again, see list above).
In the end, there's still no alternative for what is basically the Gran Turismo of bikes. But at this point, 5 games later and with all these issues, I really wish there was. RIMS racing was close, but has since been abandoned. Shame.