Red Bull Playgrounds

When I first downloaded Red Bull Playgrounds, I felt like I was the target audience for a commercial. You know, those commercials where everyone is young, fresh, and good-looking, jumping from rooftop-to-rooftop, doing backflips on BMX bikes and landing in slow-motion while the crowd cheers and confetti falls. Here, BMX, skateboarding, and parkour are mixed in a physics-based system, and you get to build your own levels, compete in time-limited events, and even unlock real extreme sports pros as mentors. It's almost as if someone took Trials, Tony Hawk, and Mirror's Edge, threw them in a blender and poured the result into a can with Red Bull branding.

The only problem is that when I started the game, it felt more like the can had been open for two days and lost all its carbonation. The first level creation started promisingly, and I clicked on a piece, placed it, and... bang, the whole game shut down. I thought it was probably just a one-off thing. But hey, it happened three times in a row and I had to reinstall the game to get the party started.

Once I got to start tapping the screen and taking part in the extreme sports package, I wasn't particularly impressed either. It was a bit like starting to build a Lego castle and discovering that someone had hidden half the pieces and glued the rest together. It's not much more than a simple little construction where you encounter predetermined tricks and press the same button on the screen over and over again, and the only thing you need to focus on is not landing on your head or doing a trick too late. It's very much "on rails" and completely lacks the freedom that I, at least, associate with extreme sports such as parkour, BMX, and skateboarding.

When it works, the gameplay itself isn't entirely bad at least. Jumping between different sports in the same race is fun and provides a certain "wow" factor. At least enough to create a brief "oh, there you go" moment. The parkour moments, where you bounce between walls and do somersaults, are reasonably satisfying when the physics actually cooperate, and the BMX part feels a bit more polished than the skateboarding, which sometimes makes the wheels stick as if you were riding in syrup. Also, unlocking real pros as mentors is a fun gimmick, even if it's mostly cosmetic and doesn't exactly revolutionise the game.

But then we come to the money that Playgrounds wants from me. The game has a "Superpass" (their own version of a battle pass) and a free track. On paper, that sounds perfectly fine. The problem? The free track goes all the way to level 99, while the paid pass stops at level 50. Yes, you read that right: the paid option has fewer levels than the free one. It's like buying a more expensive train ticket and discovering that it only takes you halfway to your destination, while the free bus goes all the way. Sure, you get faster access to certain tricks and tracks, but the setup still feels... backwards.

The progression isn't exactly generous. If you want to unlock things at a reasonable pace, you either have to put in an unreasonable number of hours or start feeding in your card details. This is nothing new in the world of mobile gaming, but here it becomes extra clear because the game is so addictive when it works. It's as if they know you want to "just play one more level" and then put little grind walls in your way, just to tempt you to pay your way past them.

And speaking of "when it works", stability is still a red flag. I've had the game freeze on loading screens, buttons disappear in the middle of a race, and sometimes the game has completely lost my input, resulting in my character standing still while the clock ticked away. There are few things that make you feel more powerless than watching your avatar slowly slide down a ramp as if they've suddenly been struck by existential angst.

The irony is that the game currently has an average rating of around 4.8 out of 5 in the App Store. I can definitely understand where the high ratings come from: for players who manage to avoid the crashes and have the patience to put up with the grind and monetisation, there is a perfectly decent and reasonably creative game here. But in my experience, it's a bit like giving a restaurant five stars because their menu looked good on the website, even though half of the dishes were missing when you sat down.

So what do I think? I think Red Bull Playgrounds is a game that both impresses and irritates me at the same time. The idea is spot on: mix three action-packed sports, give players the freedom to build their own levels, add a community where you can compete against each other, and top it off with a little professional glamour. But the execution... well, it's like winning an extreme sports event and then tripping on the podium. With the right patches and a more player-friendly economic model, this could be a firm regular on my phone. However right now, it's more of a "play when you're in a good mood and have patience for bugs" experience.

Hence why my final rating is a three, no more, no less. However, it gets one star for the idea, one for the BMX sequences when they actually work, and half a star because I still laughed at the misery sometimes. Red Bull can keep the rest until they can prove that Playgrounds is more than just a relatively nice-looking, half-finished trick show with expensive admission tickets.