TT Isle Of Man

It's been at least 10 years since we last saw a racing games based on the real-world Isle of Man TT event, so as a fan of superbike racing I was high in anticipation for this title, to put things mildly. During these 10 years I've still played the old TT Superbikes games every now and then.

There are not that many tracks in TT Isle of Man compared to other racing games. However, the courses feel authentic, which is what you want in a game that is supposed to reflect a real-life event. You want something that feels organic to the location. The heart of the game is the main course itself, which will take you 20-30 minutes or so to complete, depending on skill and assists. That's 20 minutes of continuous, seemingly very accurate, road mapping. This is not something you come across in most racing games.

The sense of speed in this game is extraordinary, far more convincing than any other motorcycle game released since the TT Superbikes games. Milestone does great motorcycle games, but they don't have the sense of speed that TT does. It's something very unique to this game. Combined with the sound of wind and believable engine sounds, it's a very immersive experience to loose yourself in.

This epic course is the star of the show, and I think Kylotonn has a done a good job in making it, and every other course, feel as convincingly accurate as possible. Keep in mind that these are supposed to be roads, not race tracks. So there are bumps to memorize the location of, sidewalks to avoid, lampposts in inconvenient places, and so on. Road racing like this offers a whole new set of challenges compared to track racing. The game does a good job of reflecting this. This accuracy comes with a significant cost though, it's both a positive and a negative.

One of the game's unique features is that, in first-person view, you can choose where your rider or camera focuses his/her gaze. To give you an example; one of them is called 'anticipated view', where the camera or gaze looks ahead to the next corner. There are other views to choose from as well, including a 'delayed' one. This offers an interesting feature to experiment with, and adds another layer to the first-person experience.

Something in TT which I haven't seen before in a superbike game: bugs on the windshield. As you ride through a course, your windshield will collect an assortment of unfortunate bugs, that smash and decorate your windshield. Sure, it adds to the realism, but for me it's a fun and quirky inclusion first and foremost.

You get a Career mode that includes some minor micromanagement stuff: earn credits from races, buy new bikes, pick events to do. As you play and do well you get invited to more and more events. So it's structured somewhat like Gran Turismo and Ride 2. I like this type of old-school progression system, so that's a plus for me. You also have a Time Trial mode, where I spent 60% of my time. I love to just jump into a game like this and race around with no pressure. You also don't have to buy or unlock the bikes before testing them out in the Time Trial.

Visually the game looks really good on a regular PS4, especially the lighting effects. The sound is important in every racing game, and I think they did a very good job with that as well. The game includes daytime effects; morning, noon, evening. There are no rain effects, since they typically don't race when it's wet on the road. There are occasional framerate drops that make the game "stutter", but it's rare, 98% of the game runs smoothly.

Every superbike in the game feels unique, they have character. This makes bike collecting a fun activity, a good thing to strive for ... in theory.

The difficulty of the AI is well-balanced, if you remember to pick the right racing event for the bike you have. You see, there are two classes of motorcycles to race with: supersport and superbike. Supersport is the "lower" class with slower motorcycles, and superbike is the one with the fastest motorcycles. Some of the racing events in the Career mode are limited to just one of these classes, but for the most part you can pick yourself if you want to race against 'super' or 'sport'. If you only have a supersport bike and accidentally pick a race against superbikes you won't win anything, and the game doesn't doesn't warn you in any way that 'hey, you don't have a superbike in your collection, are you sure you want race against superbikes?'.

Unto the negatives.

In 3rd-person view the game feels very janky and clunky, in a really bad way. In fact I consider the game more or less unplayable in this view. It doesn't achieve the smoothness of a MotoGP or SBK game, and still hints at the physics of Kylotonn's Motorcycle Club with it's twitchyness. Racing in 1st-person view make things considerably smoother and easier, I would even call it 'awesome'. It doesn't feel janky and wobbly, so this is most definitely the best way to play the game.

The margins for error are ridiculously small in the game. Even with all assists on maximum your wheels will sometimes give away for no apparent reason. Figuring out what I was doing wrong, why I was crashing in certain spots, felt like a puzzle I could not figure out at times. I ended up testing the tracks in 3rd-person view prior to racing in 1st-person, simply in order to see where the road bumps were.

Want a sample of just how difficult the game is ? If you go too fast over a certain bump you will crash, go too slow over another bump and you will crash, not going straight as a needle through a climb and you will crash. Going around each corner or bend will require a highly precise level of control on your behalf, as there's only one possible path to follow and everything has to be right; your speed and your angle.

While the game has plenty of bikes to choose from, the majority of them feel overly difficult to handle (even on the easiest difficulty setting), and I have a long history of playing motorcycle games. I ended up only buying Triumphs, because they had the best handling. It's not that I don't enjoy challenging physics, I've played SBK and MotoGP on the most challenging settings, it's that predicting the behavior of the bike is too difficult in this game; there are no warnings or enough feedback from the bike, you just suddenly crash. In MotoGP and SBK you could feel when you were pushing too hard, which is not the case in TT.

Because the margins for error are so small, you will crash a great deal in this game, this can become very irritating. It has a respawn button but this is pointless, since if you crash you might as well restart. The game would have been better if it had a rewind function. So expect lots and lots of restarts, especially if you go unprepared into a race. Ideally, you should learn a track first, through the Time Trial mode.

However, memorizing a circular track is one thing, trying to memorize a 6+ minute stretch of continuous road is asking too much from the player I think, especially with these bike physics; it takes too long and is far too difficult. 'Yes' you can use a racing-line, but these tell you nothing about the most important risk: the bumps and unevenness of the road.

The AI are very dumb and react poorly to your presence; they will often plunge into you, causing you both to crash. If you combine this with the crash-prone physics, this can become very frustrating and irritating after the n-th attempt at a race. I had to restart the majority of these races since the AI would simply plow straight into me, with zero awareness. Trying to do a "clean race" in this game proved almost impossible for me.

You can't tweak your bikes; adjust their gearing, braking, suspension and so on. This was odd to me, considering this game is definitely on the simulation side of things (in concept), rather than the arcade. It would have gone a long way in managing the punishing physics. You can however, adjust things like steering and braking sensitivity, if you look for the Control menu under Options.

With these issues in mind, I did not enjoy racing against the AI in the group starts at all, where all the riders would start together. I ended up skipping these races after a while. The other races were a tonne more fun, where each rider typically starts a few seconds before the next one, similar to stage rally.

Making progress in the game, financially, is very slow since you only get awarded money for reaching the top stop. There's no XP to benefit from either.

Minor complaints: in the Time Trial mode you can't turn off the "ghost", which I think you should be able to do in every racing game. The colour of the ghost is another issue: they decided to make it red and not transparent enough, so if it gets in front of you, you can't see the road at all. Lastly, when you are offered a racing event it's too easy to pick the wrong motorcycle category to race against as the game doesn't warn you that 'hey this race is for the superbike class and you don't have a superbike in your collection', the menu should be more clear about this.

In summary, this is a tricky game to review because I enjoyed a great deal of what the game had to offer, more specifically the "casing" of the game (visuals, sound, sense of speed, track environments, etc.). However, there were elements of the game I thought were not good at all. In the end I think it was a mistake for Kylotonn to aim for a simulation game rather than something more arcade, like DriveClub Bikes. The physics of the bikes and the accuracy of the road-mapping makes for a game that feels overly difficult to play, the game would only have benefited from being more arcade-like, more forgiving.