One of the really cool features in Urban Trial Freestyle for PS Vita and PS3 is the ability to customize your motorbike — but it’s more than just picking out shiny new parts. Bike customization is a key factor that directly affects your performance in both the Stunt and Time Attack Modes. Bike Customization allows you to adjust your bike to best meet the conditions on each of the available tracks.

Urban Trial Freestyle provides you with three main bike components to customize your vehicle — engine, chassis and wheels — customizing these parts influences three main parameters: speed, acceleration and handling. As you advance and unlock more parts, you will ultimately have four engines, four pairs of wheels and four chassis to choose from, giving you altogether a possible of 64 combinations.

If you maximize the speed parameter, you will compromise balance (along with more rigid chassis), so you will perform better in Stunts like Highest or Longest Jump but worse in Flip Meter. When you want to beat a particular Stunt record, the choice is pretty simple and you would focus on one or two factors. For Highest Jump, a good choice would be a powerful engine for maximum speed and a stiff chassis so you don’t lose too much energy when hitting the ramp. On the other hand, when you want to set a new record for the whole track, there are no simple solutions. It depends on the style of your ride and obstacles throughout the track, so there are lots of combinations to try.

Challenges Mode in Urban Trial Freestyle features five additional tracks. In this mode, gameplay on each track is based on twisted mechanisms, and totally different goals to achieve. The key factor here is that you use the skills that you acquired in the Stunt & Time Attack modes, but in totally different and twisted conditions. I don’t want to spoil all the fun and surprise, so I will describe only one of them for you – you’ll need to discover the rest on your own. :)

The Defying Gravity Challenge lets the player shift gravity with gyroscopes (integrated in both the PS Vita and PS3 versions of the game). This is really fun and twisted gameplay; when you shift the PS Vita or DualShock 3, you can ride on the walls or even ceilings. The goal here is to get to the end of the track in the fastest possible way. However, due to the change of gravity, there are a myriad of ways to do it. Mastering the control of the bike along with the shift in gravity is challenging and, when you achieve it, you can look for the optimal route though the track!

There are motorcycle arcade style games out there already, and although many are really fun (everybody remembers Elastomania!) most of them lack depth. So with Urban Trial Freestyle, we decided to add high-quality graphics and a modern social experience to the gameplay to bring this genre to a whole new level.

We wanted Urban Trial Freestyle to provide players with the highest level of competition as possible, so we are including about 100 different leaderboards. Players can compare their best score and best time depending on two different game modes. For example, in stunt mode, players can compete to be named “Best Stuntman” on every track. There are 20 tracks, and five kinds of stunts to perform on each track – and each one of them has its own leaderboard – all making Urban Trial Freestyle more unique and more competitive!

Arcade games are great for quick competitions so we also gave Time Attack mode a boost by storing the ghost of the best player on PlayStation Network so everyone can challenge him/her (it’s possible to choose worldwide best player or best amongst your friends).

We wanted to take advantage of the high-end graphics and the power that PS3‘s Cell processor provides. So we developed a live background and enhanced gameplay with secondary events like police chases, barricades, and all the demolition you can imagine when you put a crazy guy on a motorbike and let him jump over the motorway. Urban Trial Freestyle really breaks the rules of gravity with the trial biking.

We heard from Julian Dupont, the godfather of urban trial racing, that he is capable of doing most of the tricks, but I think there are quite a few in Urban Trial Freestyle that he wouldn’t dare, right? ;)

At first we wanted to keep the game’s visual design tight, as we thought that this would help us keep high quality. But then, developing proper tools helped us to speed up the process and we designed five totally different environments. Having that helped us to create a more varied riding experience, and to create lots of different conditions for stunts so each one of them is worth conquering. Social competitiveness is one of our main goals!

Urban Trial Freestyle is crazy challenging and crazy fun. You can race against ghosts, try to beat records in Stunt Mode, or focus on beating one particular stunt out of nearly a hundred. It’s all your choice. And you can repeat it again and again if you like it or race along – depends on the style of the player you are.

We’ll be updating this blog over the next few months with more details and inside scoop on Urban Trial Freestyle, so make sure you continue checking it out!