There are a surprising number of 2-wheeled racing games on Switch, more than I expected there to be, anyway. RIMs joins both the arcade and sim style racers with its own flavour of motorbike shenanigans, focusing heavily on the hardcore sim side of things. While that pays off in terms of attention to detail, the same can’t be said of the port.
RIMS runs on other more powerful consoles with a few issues so my expectations weren’t overly high that the Switch version would come though unscathed. Paused, the game looks great with nicely detailed tracks and skyline and a pretty meticulous attention to the bikes themselves. It’s when things start moving that the whole thing falls apart. a bit of a shame given that this is a game focused on speed and accuracy in order to win races.
The content side of things needs to be commended, though. NACON and RaceWard Studios have obviously got a lot of respect for the bikes and tracks and it shows in the customisation. Everything is licenced and fairly realistic, even down to the way you can replace the different parts on the bike rather than just choosing from a scrolling menu of custom parts. The eight bikes available all feel different enough to each other and adding or removing parts has a noticeable effect on their performance and handling. The physics. too, are top notch and the developers should be commended for what they’ve achieved here.
Alas, despite all the great work on the bikes and physics, the actual racing is let down by poor performance and graphics which, in turn, affects the controls. Obviously the Switch doesn’t have the luxury of having analogue triggers, which means that acceleration is more tricky to control, but even without that in the mix there’s the issue of frame rate and draw distance (or lack of it). Trees and fences don’t draw in until you’re nearly on top of them, making corners even more treacherous than they otherwise would be at these high speeds.
I’m not sure what else could have been done, I assume the physics engine is pushing the hardware even on the low graphics settings available here and downgrading the graphics further would make this a blurry mess even on a TV screen, let alone handheld. Possibly pairing this back to provide a slightly less realistic sim might have been better than one that just can’t be enjoyed due to the performance on offer here and maybe there will be patches to help with this because I’d love to see this game somehow find a way to shine on Switch, just from the amount of effort and love that has obviously been put in to the subject matter, but at the moment it’s hard to recommend.
RIMS Racing
Pros
- Amazing attention to detail
- Great use of realistic parts
- Physics is solid
Cons
- Frame rate is terrible
- Draw distance is non-existent
- Handling suffers due to technical limitations
