RIDE 6 review: a two-wheeled motorsport festival… with boss fights

The biggest change to this sixth game in Milestone’s ‘Gran Turismo minus two wheels’ RIDE series is that rather than completing events simply for cash or kudos, you’re now riding at an international festival of motorcycle racing. Pack up your sleeping bag and get ready to spend the weekend eating £17 loaded fries out of a styrofoam box, because RIDE’s gone all Forza Horizon.

The festival conceit is an important part of how the game lands as a whole, but first we need to talk about riding motorbikes. Milanese studio Milestone is a specialist – nay, the specialist – in this field, producing the MotoGP, Superbike World Championship, MXGP and Supercross series in addition to RIDE, and that means it’s got a lot of different handling models knocking about in the office. These guys know how to make a sports bike feel like a 220mph cardiac arrest, how to make a bagger feel like a canal barge on wheels, and everything in between. Including off-road bikes, a new addition to this game.

The bikes are slightly more forgiving here than in the aforementioned racing franchises, letting you trail-brake deeper into corners and go heavier on the throttle on corner exits. There are a handful of options to make it more accessible, too, like the arcade physics option and the usual array of assists. Ultimately though, you want to feel the bikes in their purest form. With the assists off, riding them is still a strikingly technical experience that forces you to respect the nuances of each category and learn smooth, controlled braking inputs as you manipulate the front and rear brakes independently.

It’s that long, gravel-flecked road to mastery that proves the most appealing bit of RIDE 6, just as it was in the previous games, and it means that the 340-strong bike list isn’t just there to fill up space on the store page. Just like you do in Forza Horizon, it’s great fun to simply spend time with different bikes and figure out their strengths. Which models suit your riding style best. Which are best at certain tracks. You can lose many evenings that way. We did.

Two new elements to RIDE 6’s career take the enjoyment of that bike mastery project up a notch. The first is the Bridgestone Riding School, which might look like a very skippable, standard issue tutorial at first. Dig into it and you’ll discover it’s actually a lot more involved, showing you techniques specific to each bike type and then having you apply the principles you learned on a short stretch of track. If you can push down the PTSD from grinding out Gran Turismo’s licenses, this proves to be a surprisingly compelling mode.

The second – and indeed the best bit of RIDE 6 as a whole – is the ‘Legends’ list. Ten real-world riders representing different racing disciplines who act as chapter bosses, peering down at you imperiously as you start the game from their position of safety. You need to complete a long sequence of events in each category to unlock the chance to race them head-to-head, and if you beat them, you win their gear.

It’s not just that we like the variety and hipster-cred of Milestone’s Legend picks. Alright, that has a lot to do with it – Troy Bayliss! James Toseland! Casey Stoner! Guy Martin! – but it’s also the structural excitement this lends to the game. Solo-focused racing games need a great big, neon-lit ‘why’ to keep you racing and progressing, and the simple proposition of proving yourself against the best of the best and then riding off with their helmet provides just that.

Time to be candid about the festival stuff now. RIDE Fest gives all those solo events a thematic coherence and some cool set dressing, all of which do their job. But bringing in the concept of a festival to a racing game in 2026 inevitably invites comparisons to Forza Horizon, the series which pioneered it and has lavished levels of polish and production on it that very few other studios could realistically match. There aren’t scores of DJs commentating on what you’re doing or epic tents complete with massive crowds and laser shows in the background of your races. There aren’t bombastic, Michael Bay-approved Showcase events to close out each chapter. There are banners, a DJ spinning some tunes, and… not much else. This is the kind of festival you could actually get some sleep at in the campsite.

Milestone has to work harder and smarter than its peers in order to deliver an ambitious concept like this, and commendable as the end result is, you do also notice some compromises along the way. This game shares much of its cosmetics like helmets and ‘butt patch’ designs with the MotoGP series, for example, and the introduction of arcade handling feels very reminiscent of that series’ most recent release too.

That doesn’t hold RIDE 6 back from being a success. Regardless of the festival trimmings, this is still a game about mastering a vast array of highly detailed and physically demanding bikes, and that’s more enjoyable than ever thanks to a bit of added structure that helps guide and define your mastery.