So Trials Evolution Gold has finally arrived on the PC. I was a big fan of this series back when it was on the PC, and I was really looking forward to a fun, straightforward game like Trials to distract me from end of semester stress. I bought it on Tuesday planning to have it pre-loaded and ready to go for its release date, which is today (the 21st of march). I was initially dismayed to find it was published by Ubisoft and used Uplay alongside Steam. I didn't have many problems with the service when playing the Assassin's Creed games so I wasn't overly concerned, and was then surprised to find I could already play Trials. Apparently there had been an open beta for those who pre-ordered, and they were letting people play the beta until the game released.

     I spent a bunch of time playing the game on Tuesday and Wednesday on my desktop, finishing the beginner, easy and medium tracks and amassing about 120 medals. The game had some performance problems; stuttering whenever the frame rate dropped below 60 and awful screen tearing that forces you to use Vsync. The day one patch didn't fix this either, and even though it doesn't look all that great, the game still stutters and runs poorly on my powerful gaming PC. Despite this I have been greatly enjoying the game.

     I decided to try installing the game on my laptop because it seems like the kind of game I can mess around with for short periods of time when I need a break from studying or essay writing. I installed the game and booted it up, only to find that my save games hadn't carried over from my desktop. I found the save game file on my desktop, copied it onto a USB key and transferred it to my laptop. Still my progress did not carry over. I figured Uplay was probably the cause of my frustrations, so I started looking around in the settings. I noticed that cloud synchronization had defaulted to 'on' for my laptop, but 'off' for my desktop. I turned it on for my desktop, hoping it would ask me if I wanted to upload the files from my desktop onto the steam cloud so my progress synced. Instead, it overwrote the progress from my desktop with the progress from my laptop... which is no progress at all. Four hours of play time lost in an instant, thanks to a broken service that never should have existed.

I've always disliked Ubisoft as a PC publisher, they predictably delay PC games and bundle them with terrible DRM, loads of bugs and performance issues. After repeatedly accusing PC gamers of pirating their games 95% of the time, they recently said they wanted to improve their relations with PC gamers. Well Ubisoft, if you want to rebuild the bridge that you burnt so eagerly and vigorously over the past several years, purge Uplay from existence, optimize and bug test your games, and maybe then we will stop pirating your products.

Trials Evolution is a great game. I encourage anyone who reads this to steer clear.