Recent reviews by flow

I'm leaving this review so hopefully the developer can see this as my desperate plea to fix the game.

I'm hopeful for what this game could maybe be in the future with modding, but this is no way worth the money right now, or even better than the original Pipe made several years ago. I was a bit surprised with how high the price was.

I have 800+ hours in the previous Pipe BMX made by the same developer, I struggle to perform absolute basics in this game. The reworked controls, physics, and gameplay are so difficult, and so poorly balanced and implemented it's rage inducing. It feels as if this game was never tested at any point. As the game is so fundamentally full of points of friction that make me want to not play it.

There is a lot of polish and content to be desired outside of these problems, but completely forgetting the fact the UI/UX is very poor, It's a giant empty world, the SFX is jarring and a bit off, poor performance, etc. I just can't get past the fact the fundamental bike mechanics are so much more tedious, difficult, and inconsistent than they should be. I'd happily ignore all other drawbacks if the core controls felt right, but they don't, There are so many little problems that it adds up to a very frustrating experience.

I'll change the review in a heartbeat if the core controls are fixed. Below are the key parts that ruin the experience for me.

- Can't perform a trick and hop at the same time, you have to give hop input then give the same input all over again with a trick key, you could do this in Pipe and was far better, and more streamlined to just whip and hop at the same time to do a hop whip.
- Turning mid air stops and starts too suddenly making it very hard to control spins mid air.
- Most of the tricks across the game animate too slowly compared to what is needed to perform them over most obstacles comfortably, or even what's possible in real life. It's almost impossible to do 1080's, triple whips, double backflips, etc in any scenario that isn't a mega ramp, which can all be done over a normal sized box in real life, or in the previous game.
- Transition/spinning magnets are over the top and the controls to alter fly out and pumping just create more keys to press that further convolute the controls. The magnets also pull you over the top of rails to slopes on the other side, making grinding impossible in some areas.
- In general every complex trick combo takes double the amount of inputs, with half the control and freedom the previous game had/what is expected from a game like this.
- The game constantly loops you out when having the slightest turning mid transition, it makes just manoeuvring the bike around a skatepark a very high level skill that's very finicky, instead of just a fun thing to do.
- The input times are too over the top accurate, the detection between hitting just LB, to hitting both LB and RB together is very very very small. You need to literally hit the buttons within a micro second or it detects as just hitting one button. All of the input windows for multiple keys need to be bigger.
- Using LT to flip is a worse control scheme for flipping than Pipe and should be re-thought. Simply just spinning with the sticks was great. Having the modifier button makes yet another button to press, in a game already filled with extra buttons to press that shouldn't need to be.
- A lot of small but meaningful tricks no longer exist, there's actually a significantly smaller trick pool in this. You can't hold to do multiple barspins, can't do proper dip spins (only barrel roll or spin flips), can't switch stance using thumbstick during gameplay, no more sliders, then half the tricks you can do just don't look good at all.

I have been immensely excited for this game for months. I really looked forward to this release, but It honestly just needs a whole lot of feedback, testing, and improvements before it is an actual playable game.