Tour De France 2021 is an intense cycling sim that brings the legendary circuit to life.
The Tour De France is an incredibly prestigious competition. It is a feast for the cycling enthusiast’s eyes as the best men’s teams from around the globe come to face off. Speed, endurance and team coordination are all tested in this exciting cycling circuit. Tour De France 2021 puts you right into the action as you fly through the tracks of the legendary tour and manage your team to claim the glorious yellow jersey.
Getting the gold means racing your hardest and the Tour De France 2021 is no ride through the park. The courses are long and segmented into portions such as climbing and sprinting, with each rewarding points to individual racers based on performance. With the solo or team-based career modes being the focus of the game, it’s important to perform well in order to attract the best of the best. These systems are surprisingly in-depth and can be overwhelming to take in all at once, as the game never walks you through the relevant stats or rider focuses. These are important to learn, as you’ll be able to coordinate your racers via a comm menu and take control of any racer on your team during a race. This allows skilled players to maximize their points across the team as they fly through the games’ beautiful locales.
The visuals work well, with riders having a refined level of detail in spite of the sheer number that can appear on screen. This makes the game look fantastic in motion, especially when you catch a burst of speed and your surroundings become a blur. These moments are amplified by the cheers of the French crowd as you fly by them. You’re also able to fast-forward through certain portions of the course, if you feel confident in the AI. The points are collected at the end of the race, with the winning team being the one who earns the most points. While racing may seem straightforward, especially with the ability to control each racer at will, learning to ride has a bit of a learning curve.
There is more to racing than just speed and points in this tournament. Controlling your rider is a robust experience that emphasizes pacing and control over pure speed. While you’ll have pulse-pounding sprints and neck-and-neck climbs against other racers, they don’t make up the majority of the race. Tour De France 2021 is a single-player focused game where most of your time is spent controlling your pacing to keep your stamina meters in check, which are located in a small compass on the bottom right of the screen. It’s divided up into a yellow speed meter, blue stamina and a red attack meter. The controls are built around this 3-tiered system, making understanding it all imperative to victory.
While the steering and general control of your rider is simple, the devil is in the details. Running out of stamina means suffering a blowout, which is a slow and difficult state to recover from. It’s easy to do if you don’t quite understand the pacing of how races work in the game and playing for the long win is usually preferable over an early blowout. You’re able to control your stamina in various ways, including ‘attacking,’ which means to go for a sudden burst of speed. Using this in conjunction with controlling the pace of your rider to maximize stamina efficiency is imperative during these deceptively long races and while you may have a few methods of quick recovery, you’ll quickly learn that they do not easily cover your mistakes. This may give you a jarring first impression, as the tutorial never goes into the length or different phases of the race.
Tour De France 2021 is an engaging and robust cycling sim. From the spot-on aesthetic to the in-depth riding systems, fans of the prestigious cycling competition will appreciate the detail and care put into bringing the intense cycling experience to life. However, the game front-loads a great many systems onto the player all at once and directs them to an online manual to understand the more in-depth mechanics. When combined with a tutorial that proves itself to be bare-bones in nature, you’ll find yourself learning the pacing and finer points of racing the hard way, which can make for a deflating experience. With in visuals that look their best while you’re in-motion, a minimalist soundtrack and no multiplayer modes, Tour De France 2021 proves itself to be a game most suited for fans of the sport.
Pros
– Robust Career modes
– Strategic team-based gameplay
– Great sense of speed
Cons
– Complicated control system
– Lackluster tutorial
– Weak rider customization
3 out of 5
Review key provided by Homerun PR. Tour De France 2021 is out now on Steam, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, Playstation 4 and Playstation 5!
