Cycling, it’s that thing you are expected to do as a kid to gain a little bit of freedom from your parents. Just look at E.T., Stranger Things, or IT, and you’ll see that all the kids have bikes. They have them because it means they are no longer tethered to their house and the block it lays on. It creates this sense of adventure they can have, not only allowing them to roam across town for hours, but also letting them find monsters, aliens, and horrors. It was a symbol of the 80s child, and even until mid-2000s there was a strong presence of kids using bikes to get around town.

Now kids with their video games only know how to ride a bike by using a controller, thanks to people who are afraid of their children getting hurt on bikes. Some games have done perfectly adequate things with the bike. It isn’t a hard thing to put into a game either, since you don’t have to make it expeditious, you don’t have to do a lot of research into how it works and most people, I’d argue, know what to do with a bike. The same physics that applies to all objects in the universe applies to a bike. Sure, there are BMX bikes that can go backward, there are racing bikes that can hit 60km/h, and general bikes you’d find children using. We should know what they feel like in-game or in reality.

So, let’s talk about Tour de France 2020, developed by Cyanide S.A. and published by Nacon, formally known as Big Ben Interactive. It is filled with biker names you’ve never heard of such as Julian Alaphilippe. Much like the other numbered rules, such as 34, 69, and 88, I want to make another one to be added. If there is a thing to be spoken about, there is a game about it. A virus that’s killing hundreds and thousands of people? Someone’s made a game out of that. Yes, the internet believes anything can be a joke, including death.

With that said, Tour de France 2020 is entirely about doing as Queen once said and riding in a (WARNING: video is age-gated) bicycle race. There are sections where you’re picking members of your team in dull menus that do little to enhance the experience, but for the most part, you’re getting Tinea Cruris (crotch rot). Surely being a game entirely about cycling and the advantages thereof, I should be saying it is the best at bike mechanics in a game, right? Wrong! In fact, I’d say it is up there with driving a car in Halo, cars in Watch_Dogs, or those god awful vehicle sections in Mass Effect.

The way to move a bike is through a repeated motion taken from the Greek word κύκλος (circle). Of course, you can’t do that entirely with a controller, so there needs to be a workaround. Simply enough, many games through the 2000s made you tap A or X, depending on your controller. That made sense, you are still doing a repeated motion and depending on how quickly you were at tapping, you would go faster or slower. Tour de France 2020 doesn’t do this. Instead, you are asked to delicately hold the RT or R2 trigger/button (depending on your preference) to do this cycling motion in-game.

Let me explain why that’s annoying, you’ll be doing do so for the better part of about 2 hours. There will be times to put more pressure into your hold, but for the most part, you are managing your energy by lightly feathering RT. This doesn’t work, simply because that function does what a throttle does on a car, such as in F1 2019. Naturally, with what is meant to be a throttle, you want to gun it like there is no tomorrow. That defeats the purpose of managing energy. I’ll return to my point: Why shift from rhythmically tapping, which gives enough of a feeling of cycling, to something that’s not even close?

In fact, let’s bring F1 back into this for a moment. I’ve driven thousands of miles in super-powered monsters of machinery in-games. Naturally, they are built to turn on wheels which themselves rotate at speeds that are uncountable by the naked human eye. Much like race bikes used in the Tour de France, they are built for speed. Both are made for high-performance use and can do great things in the right hands. However, under game physics that are questionable, there are cracks formed. Specifically, I want to talk about friction and the use of it in Tour de France 2020.

In F1 you have a style of driving called “lift and coast.” It is aimed at fuel management and you allow the friction of the car to slow you down most of the way into a corner, all before braking to take the corner properly. While riding a bike, you could do the same replacing fuel with energy, but you can’t properly do that in Tour de France 2020. You see, to give the illusion that you are going fast while peddling in the oddest way possible, the second you lift off there is a force stopping you almost instantly. This is not one observed in our simple dimensions: Super friction.

Lift off the peddle/throttle slightly and within a second and maybe a half you’ve come to a stop. That’s maybe about 10-15 feet. I’m not talking about the steepest incline up Mount Kilimanjaro, on a slight decline or almost perfectly flat road. If you are going 37 miles per hour there should be at least 50 feet before you come to a stop on a flat, dry road on average. This is ignoring that as soon as you touch the dirt on the side of roads by accident, you are stopping in inches, maybe a foot or two. So no, the cycling in the game all about cycling around France and on other tours isn’t fun.

Is there anything in there for anyone? I guess if you do follow cycling like some follow F1, it might be interesting. However, that’s where I have to point something out. In either F1 games, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games, or even wrestling games, you don’t need that knowledge to enjoy the game. They have their own following that might cross over, and they have a following that just enjoys the games. I don’t know where someone would appreciate Tour de France 2020 as a fun game other than those that religiously follows the career of Henri Pélissier, Jacques Anquetil, or Maurice Garin. Once you’ve Googled those names I’ll say, I told you so.

Is it a bad game? No, it is just lacking fun or proper explanation of some of the terminology, so people who just play the games might understand it in some small way. For long enough I was confused at who this peloton was, then I was told and I still didn’t get it, so I had to look into that.

Put that alongside a lack of options to switch up controls, a lot of French people shouting at me that I couldn’t hit with a bike, or things like slow loading times, a huge lapse of performance on autosaving points, and people just walking on to the road and the racing line, you’ll find that there is a lot to look past if you do enjoy it. I couldn’t begrudge anyone of enjoying Tour de France 2020 as much as I do with MMOs or really anything else. It is a niche, you enjoy it, so go for it!

An Xbox One review copy of Tour de France 2020 was provided by Nacon for this review.

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Tour de France 2020

$39.99

5

Score

5.0/10

Pros

• Lengthy stints of play.

Cons

• On consoles you're unable to turn off motion blur
• A lack of button mapping.
• Physics misunderstanding their role in the game.
• Environments feel stale.