Trials Fusion is a puzzle game disguised as a motorbike racer. The premise is quite simple: all you need to do is ride your motorbike along a two-dimensional path while balancing your rider just right so that he is able to jump over obstacles and navigate difficult terrain without falling on his head. If you can pull off a trick or two while doing it, all the better. Each level is timed, giving you a way to compare your performance with that of your friends, and a way to determine what medal you’ll earn.

While that may all sound rather easy, believe me it’s not. There’s a reason it’s called Trials: getting each track right will take a lot of practice – trial and error if you will – and your manual dexterity and mental agility will be tested to the Nth degree before you’ve come anywhere close to mastering the game. Or any one track, really.

In the beginning, even on the introductory tracks, you will spend more time falling off your bike than you will making successful landings. I say that because that’s what happened to me – it took me a good fifteen minutes to get the hang of balancing my rider properly. My initial efforts nearly always resulted in my guy going flying; fortunately, resetting is a quick button-press away and I was always back on the proverbial horse faster than I could say “Damn!”.

I liked that I was slowly introduced to the idea of balancing my rider with a series of introductory tracks, making the progression to more difficult tracks rather natural. But of course, just as I started to feel comfortable with the controls and what was expected of me, wham, another track with a new challenge to master appeared. I was constantly kept on my toes.

On the flip side, the inherent difficulty also meant that pulling off an insane stunt, landing it and finishing a track in record time proved immensely satisfying. Ditto with beating my friends’ times and ditto with finishing a level in a single run with no mistakes whatsoever.

Basically, Trials Fusion is one of those really tough games that takes pleasure in punching you repeatedly in the face, metaphorically speaking, but which also offers vast rewards in the way of satisfaction when your skills grow to the point where its initially-tough challenges no longer make your palms sweat.

Make no mistake, though: getting to that point is going to take a lot of time and practice. Or at least, it did for me. Fortunately, levels aren’t hugely long, load times on the PS4 are very quick and playing is fun, despite the challenge. Or because of it, depending on what kind of gamer you are.

Getting everything right at the right time is the game’s most difficult challenge, since you have to do it all at speed. You’ll need a great sense of judgement AND incredibly good reflexes in order to land safely and complete the many and varied courses the game throws at you.

Succeeding means progress, which unlocks additional tracks, bikes and accessories for your rider as you level up. The accessories are purely visual, but the bikes that unlock are typically more powerful than what you had before; that power makes a difference to how they control and thus your performance on the tracks. It’s fun to play earlier tracks with newer bikes just to see how much of a difference they make to your times.

What makes Trials Fusion so good is that it’s difficult but fair, and very satisfying if you’re able to stick with it long enough to learn to do what it asks of you.

There is no online multiplayer in the game, however. There is local four-player multiplayer, but the online multiplayer is only coming in the next few months according to the developers. Local multiplayer is fun as it has you racing your buddies across specially-designed four-player tracks, but of course you’ll need multiple Dualshock 4 controllers to play. It’s not a feature I’d buy the game for, but it is definitely amusing.

And if you somehow run out of tracks to drive on and you want more of a challenge, you can create your own tracks with the game’s built-in editor. It’s incredibly complicated and I must admit I struggled to get my head around it all, but there are introductory videos on YouTube to watch that will help you get started. Tracks created by the Trials Fusion community can be downloaded and played at your leisure, and there are around 7 000 of them at the time of writing so there’s a bunch of extra content to give the game some legs.

I reviewed Trials Fusion on the PS4, and of course it looked fantastic. I particularly liked the sci-fi theme although the music was a bit annoying – particularly the song that plays in the menu – so I turned it off after a while.

So is Trials Fusion worth the cash? Since it’s quite cheap for a PS4 game – it’s just R299 in the ZA PSN Store – definitely. It’s a fun diversion from all the shooting/role-playing/driving/LEGO stud-collecting I’ve been doing in other games, and even though I don’t see myself playing Fusion constantly for weeks to come, I will definitely fire it up every now and then to check out the new tracks created by the community.

Platforms: Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
RRP: R299