TT Isle of Man: Ride on the Edge 2
KT Racing / Bigben Interactive
While I’ve always been a fan of racing games that feature four-wheeled vehicles, ones that focus on two-wheeled ones have never impressed me. While I’ve seen some very crazy motorcycle races in real life that captured the almost hypersonic speeds that the vehicles are capable of (especially when watching from the bike-affixed cameras), digital renditions of said races just don’t convey the same sense of speed. The motorcycle video game market is also pretty shallow, with both the MotoGP and Ride franchises being the only ones that come to mind.
Back in 2018, developer KT Racing changed all of that with their upstart title: TT Isle of Man: Ride on the Edge. While it was far from perfect, it did manage to translate the sense of speed that you’d think you’d feel from a motorcycle, except in digital form.
KT Racing went back to the drawing board for the newest sequel, TT Isle of Man: Ride on the Edge 2. They’ve completely overhauled the game’s physics model and even improved each motorcycle’s handling this time around as you attempt to tackle the famous Snaefell circuit and other roads throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Luckily, the game gets you acclimated to all these changes with a handy, albeit brief, tutorial. It gets you used to the manual gears as well as the handling mechanics since they can be a little over-responsive at times (at least in my humble opinion).
From there, you can choose between the standard modes that racing games come with. The shocker to me, however, was the open-world roads that you’re able to traverse. If you’re still not ready to jump from the tutorial right into a race yet, this is a good way to break the bikes in and get more used to them.
Regardless, whenever you’re ready to take the big plunge, TT Isle of Man: Ride on the Edge 2 features a full-on Career Mode. You’ll have to pick a team and then take on a bunch of different races in order to see where you place in the TT (which stands for Tourist Trophy by the way).
But you’re not limited to these official races alone. In a cool twist, you can enter less major races and you don’t have to use your team bike, you can use ones that you’ve purchased on the side. In this way, you can boost your reputation and earn some extra cash.
And then there are Perks that you can also earn. Perks can be spent on things such as boosting elements of your bike or mitigating negative factors. Sometimes you don’t know if a Perk will be good or bad for certain races, so this adds an element of unpredictability to the proceedings.
TT Isle of Man: Ride on the Edge 2’s AI is pretty damn good. Usually, if I utilized my bike’s capabilities correctly and navigated a road with the utmost of skill, I’d finish within the top three if not winning the race. However, the roads can be unforgiving if you even as much as bump into small objects; your bike will go careening off into a crash.
Although going over 100 mph on a bike and then surviving a direct hit into a wall isn’t very realistic, I understand why the developers had to allow this to happen from a gameplay perspective. It would have been cool if they had a death mode though, so if you got involved in a serious high-speed crash, you wouldn’t just pop back on your bike after one.
TT Isle of Man: Ride on the Edge 2 is probably the only motorcycle racing game that has fully captured that elusive sense of speed that should be present in any two-wheeled racer. It has fantastic physics and handling mechanics in place that put it head and shoulders above its competitors, however few they may be.
OVERALL SCORE: 79%
TT Isle of Man: Ride on the Edge 2 has some pretty good looking graphics that make its racing gameplay truly shine. However, you want to have a pretty beefy gaming PC or gaming laptop in order to play it at a decent framerate. So, you may just want to invest in a decent gaming rig:
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