Osr Unhinged Review

If you liked Trials HD, you’re going to love this quaint little indie title, Osr Unhinged. Sure, it doesn’t look quite as good, but the level of imagination that has clearly gone into the game is pretty much unsurpassed. I reviewed Red Bull X-Fighters not so long ago, and if anything can make a case for indie games being more worthy of your time than full-priced titles, this is it.

So, Osr Unhinged is just Trials HD with ropey, if cute, graphics and a somewhat less realistic take on the genre. The environments are large, chunky blocks of earth, metal or other assorted detritus, and you have to get from the start to the finish in as quick a time as possible. This is often an easy task, but in order to do it ‘properly’ you’ll have to run through the levels and collect all the tokens scattered around the place. These tokens open up the various bikes, with each bike fitting a particular style of course better than others.

If anything, its even more playable than Trials HD, as the difficulty is nowhere near as hard as it could be, and bar a few seriously irritating sections, you’ll probably get through a majority of it in a couple of evenings of concerted play. Toward the end you’ll see a steep hike in difficulty, but then I consider that to be a bonus.

Despite having some rather arbitrary additions to gameplay, such as strong winds pinning you to a surface, this is less ridiculous than you might normally think. Indeed, where Trials HD delivers insane jumps and some truly spectacular moments, Osr Unhinged prefers to dwell more in the puzzle side of the genre, challenging you to work out how to get over something before you go smashing into it full pelt.

I really did enjoy this extreme sports indie title. Were it not for Trials HD, I suspect this wouldn’t have been made, so one can’t really applaud the developer for thinking outside the box. What it does is very enjoyable for the pittance it costs, and for some, I imagine the fun is a little purer than even the almighty Trials HD.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Microsoft Xbox 360 code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.