Developer: Cyanide Studios
Publisher: Bigben Interactive
Platform: PS4, Xbox One
Tested on: PS4
Tour de France 2019 – Review
Get ready to cycle through all the stages of the world-famous Tour de France and experience the highs and lows that come with being a professional cyclist. Battle your way through all 21 stages of the Tour that have been recreated in this game, down to the smallest details, courtesy of developer Cyanide Studios and publisher Bigben Interactive. It’s up to you to make the right decisions at the right time and fight for that world-renowned yellow jersey and arrive at the Champs-Élysées as the absolute champion of the Tour.
Story
Trying to fit a story into a game like this can be rather challenging since it revolves completely about the sport itself. But you can, however, create your own cyclist, or manage your own cycling team and try your luck against every other cyclist on the roster.
That being said, it’s not entirely impossible to fit stories into sports games, if you look at the NBA 2K series or Fifa, they always come with their own story mode in which your created character always has a journey they must go through to reach their ultimate goal. They take you along said journey and you really get to feel how your character feels. Here you simply create a rider and that’s pretty much it. You have other famous races you can partake in like Vlaanderen Classic and Paris-Roubaix, but in the end, there really is no story you can follow. The closest you actually come to a story is you have to beat certain stages to unlock others.
It would have been nice to create your very own cyclist that you then had to practice with, work your way through the ranks and do a lot of smaller events while building up experience and then have the Tour de France as a goal to accomplish.
Graphics
The game looks okay but a bit dated at some points. There are lots of little details but they don’t all shine through as well. It does, however, run smoothly and along the stages, there are tons of people, all cheering you on, which really makes you experience, in part, how it’s like being at one of these stages.
There’s a lot of attention to the jerseys all the riders wear, so you can really distinguish which rider is with which team. That comes in handy because there are over 700 riders in this game, spanning over 20 teams. So, when a group of 100 people is behind you, its handy to know who is who.
Sadly, the same effort hasn’t been put into everything, since nearly all the faces look the same, just a slightly different skin tone. The same can be said for the bikes, they are all carbon copies of each other, just in a different color, but all the stickers on it, and the places where the color changes, are exactly the same.
Sound
You can really see they wanted to capture the ambiance that is at the stages with the fans cheering you on. Of course, there are parts where people aren’t standing by the side of the road, but then you hear the wind going over your cyclist and the rattling of the chains.
You also get constant updates from your team manager about what is happening in front and within your own team, providing you with useful information that should help you decide what your next move should be.
The soundtrack is just…okay, at best. There aren’t any memorable songs that will get stuck in your head for weeks, as well as there is really no banter you can hear between the cyclists while you do the entire race. They don’t really interact with each other whatsoever.
Gameplay
Tour de France is a cycling sim where you either take control of a single rider or, take command of a team and help on the strategic side of things. Manage your own character, that can be created even though that is very limited, or your riders to the best of your abilities and try to grab points to qualify yourself for the big tournaments.
There are a lot of things you have to take into consideration when you play Tour de France. There is a training area in which you will be made familiar with all the aspects that come with being a professional cyclist, as well as issuing commands to your teammates and keeping the manager updated about your condition. While this sounds pretty good, it actually is pretty basic in execution and becomes boring very fast and in the end it basically all comes down to stamina management.
A feature that you will love is that you can accelerate the time when you are in the commands menu, by simply pressing the left trigger. Depending on how hard you press, time will advance much quicker. This is immensely useful when there are long flat stretches of road.
If you prefer the management side of things, then you can also just step into the role of team manager in Pro Team mode. Here you will manage a team and try to move it up in the rankings so you can be invited to the most prestigious races. As a result of this you will be able to recruit better or even the best riders available, to get a shot at the Tour as a team.
New in this iteration of the Tour de France game is the addition of online multiplayer, where you can race random people or friends for online supremacy. Along with this, there’s also the challenge mode where you can either do downhill or sprint challenges, which then are posted to a global leaderboard.
One thing that really has to be said, is that the AI can be awfully inconsistent. One race they barely know what a bike is, and the other race they are untouchable or they rubber-band super hard, which means getting away from them and getting a lot of distance between you and the peloton is nearly impossible.
Conclusion
In the end, it all comes down to personal preference. If you are a big cycling fan, then this will probably please you, but even then some things cannot be ignored; the blatant lack of different characters, nearly every bike looks the same, lack of interaction between all the cyclists and the awful AI that can really ruin an entire race since they become more of a hassle to handle than a challenge to overcome. Sadly, it becomes very tedious to play Tour de France 2019 very quickly.
Tour de France 2019 - Review,
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