RISE is essentially a single player, arcade racer with a subtly futuristic aesthetic and a less subtly futuristic twist wherein your car Marty McFly's itself over the faintest hint of a puddle. Overall, it's a well made and enjoyable racer with plenty of variety to keep you engaged. It's worth £15 and certainly worth picking up on sale.
In depth:
Whilst there's only a few racing biomes, the arrangement of tracks across these areas allow for a wide selection of adequately different feeling races, ranging from short and fast circuits to lengthy, technical ones. The mixture of racing surfaces, dirt, tarmac, ice, water (yes water) and the variable weather conditions keep the races feeling fresh and new.
The car selection is perhaps a little more limited, consisting of only ten vehicles, but each vehicle is exceptionally well designed and each has fairly unique handling characteristics. Those characteristics can be further refined to personal taste with a selection of three sliders on the vehicle select screen, a feature I believe wasn't initially included at launch but patched in later based on feedback, and by selecting the way in which the car's boost meter fills up. As the performance of the cars increases you may well find yourself relying on these modifier to make them more controllable.
There's a good variety of game modes too; a career mode that not only requires winning races but fulfilling specific criteria per race (such as never being overtaken, drifting for a certain distance, or reaching a certain speed), a more standard championship mode, single races and time trials. I personally wasn't bothered by it, but it should be noted that there is, however, no online multiplayer.
The music is sadly a touch forgettable and generic, but the sound effects are otherwise exemplary.
I would say the car handling may be the make or break factor on whether you enjoy this game; whilst I would consider this game to be more of an arcade racer than a sim, the physics are a little more on the realistic side and can be unforgiving of mistakes; for instance if you hit a jump wrong, or clip the scenery, you may well end up spinning out in a way that looses you the race. Flying across the water can be equally fraught with danger as a car hovering along at full pelt, unimpeded by friction, is apparently very easy to spin out. Flying across the surface of a lake requires you to pick sweeping, smooth race lines and to avoid sharp cornering.
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P.S. I've played this through twice now, once on switch and once on PC, but I have no feedback regarding the VR mode.
