Cycling Videogame Review: Bike Stars
We’ve often written about cycling videogames in our 16 years of having a website semi-related to bicycles. What was once a barren wasteland of obscure Japanese keirin games, strange DOS churn, and Paperboy eventually gave way to Pro Cycling Manager, the gold standard of the genre.
It combined Championship Manager style squad management with in-game tactics to produce a complete, though occasionally a little rough, simulation that allowed you to fulfill your impotent wishes as a fan right terrible injustices like Ivan Basso not beating Lance Armstrong in 2005.
Some brief dabbling in arcade racing games gave the publisher, and the genre, another breakthrough, creating the interminably slow but mostly satisfying Tour de France games for consoles. We’re more than a decade on from those games though, and the cycling fandom is braying for something new.
Enter BIKE STARS.
Bike Stars (Android)
Bike Stars is a game about racing a bike in a variety of realistic environments like deserts, city roads, and a spiral with barriers on it.
It’s free. You can play it on the toilet. It absolutely fucking sucks.
Gameplay
Bike Stars masterfully reduces the complexities of bicycle racing to a simple mechanic. Touch the screen to move, let go to stop. No drafting, no steering, no energy management. Just some bikes and a lot of fingering. It’s like being 16 again.
But why wouldn’t you simply put your finger on the screen for the duration of race? Because you’ll sometimes encounter roads with cars who will mow you down without hesitation. It’s a cycling simulation designed by British city planners.
If you get run down, your bike shatters and you collapse. Then you get back up and race some more, having lost ground on your rivals.
Sometimes you’re on the same road as the cars and have to slow down to avoid riding into them. Sometimes you cross a busy side street. Sometimes you encounter some other bullshit that requires you to lift your finger by 1mm for a second to avoid the mild inconvenience of violently dying.
And that’s about it. You ride faster than your rivals by default, so you always stand a good chance of winning the race. And when you win, you get… Well, kind of fuck all. In fact, you go to the next race regardless of whether you won, so you can easily progress through the season by being the worst cyclist in the field. It’s a Chris Froome 2021 simulator.
At the end of each race, you’ll jump up a ramp. Tap at the right time to hit the center of a bar to maximize your time wheelying on a ledge that you’ll land on. The longer you wheely, the more coins you unlock.
Buy Every Bike
And what can you spend coins on? Two categories of things, actually, but one is genuinely fun. It’s the only good part of the game in fact.
That thing is bikes. But not just bikes: bikes AND riders. They’re all wacky.
Ever wanted to race as a businessman on a Brompton without riding a Rapha nocturne in London? Now you can. It won’t change the racing experience in any way, but you’ll look better while you do it. Like buying an S-Works bike.
Some of these bike-rider combinations are fun. Fun enough that you’ll want to play a single race with them. Time-trial guy looks fast, even if you shouldn’t be racing with tribars. Actually, you shouldn’t be racing with any of these bikes.
But, in fact, forget buying them because you don’t actually need coins to unlock any of them. You can just watch an ad and unlock a bike at random. Watch twelve ads and you’ve unlocked them all in the time it would take you to remember to turn on subtitles on that Dutch erotic thriller on Tubi that you’re only watching because you like the director’s later work.
In this sense, you don’t ever need to actually play at all, which is the hallmark of a good game.
Become a Better Cyclist
You can also spend your coins to improve your guy’s cycling skills, like a pushy parent at Manchester velodrome trying for one last attempt at some vicarious success with the latest Dolan frame. A time traveler from 2004 wrote that last sentence, sorry.
The skills you can upgrade are:
Acceleration, which sounds like it would make you faster, but doesn’t seem to do anything. And even if it did make a difference, winning the race doesn’t matter at all, remember?
Finish jump, which makes you wheely for a bit longer. So basically lets you earn more coins to spend on longer wheelies, which lets you earn more coins to spend on longer wheelies, which lets…
Offline earnings, which also doesn’t seem to do anything. Sounds like you can earn coins from not playing, but we didn’t notice if that was the case. Just think: if they were real coins, you’d be getting paid to not play this abomination.
So, all are pointless, but they do let you make the number next to the word ‘LVL’ go up, if that’s your thing.
Making Cyberpunk 2077 Look Polished
The game also has a whole bunch of glitches that are either annoying or mildly amusing, depending on your perspective. They can only be escaped from by closing the app. In that sense, they’re the best thing about Bike Stars.
Consider that you’ll sometimes win a race, wheely along the ramp, then stop and hover in midair for eternity.
Consider, too, that sometimes your rivals will get in a death spiral of crashes at the start of the race, and then be so far back that they must’ve fallen out of the game’s memory. When that happens, you can’t finish the race for some reason.
When this happens, there’s no recourse but to close the app and then reopen it so you can play it for long enough to get some screenshots for an article discussing how bad it is. The whole experience isn’t ‘accidentally wearing your mum’s pants to school on PE day’ awful, but it is fairly unpleasant.
Verdict
10/10, best game ever.
Download it. Play it for 15 seconds. Forget to uninstall it while it installs a Russian trojan horse on your phone and uses one of your processor cores to mine cryptocurrency.