Riders Republic's deep dive trailer shows it's the silly open world sports game I want

I've mentioned preview that Riders Republic was one of the game's I'm most looking forward to, and the "deep dive" trailer at tonight's Ubisoft Forward didn't change my mind. It's got hang-gliders with jets on them? And big mountains to fall down? What else are games even for.

The trailer mostly shows the sorts of things we've seen already: it's a big, open world extreme sports/racing game. What we saw that's new was more of the meta structure that surrounds the events. It is what you'd expect: you get points for almost everything, points can be used to customise your rider, and there are lots of modes and creative widgets to play with.

There was a point during the trailer's early tour of the 'hub' area that I realised that it had a very 'Horizon festival' vibe. As in, the extremely silly, upbeat joy of the Forza Horizon games, that grounds its motorhead races in the context of a big festival of cars. Riders Republic looks like a festival of bikes and wingsuits.

The bikes and downhill mountain races look particularly thrilling, and if the game just lets me do that a bit, and explore some pretty mountaintops across its world, then I'll be happy.

Riders Republic launches on September 2nd.

E3 2021 may be over but our memories live on - see everything on our E3 hub. Many more big game showcases and streams are still to come this summer, leading up to Gamescom, so see our summer games stream schedule to stay up to date.