Tour de France 2015 Review

Tour De Force?

The Tour De France games have been pumped out year after year, with seemingly little to distinguish them. Can the 2015 edition break free from the peloton?

Storyline:

I have to admit I know very little about the world of professional cycling, despite the success of Britons Chris Froome and Bradley Wiggins, and even the whole tour coming to the UK last year. But Tour De France 2015 assumes you know it all already.

Barring some gameplay tutorials (which are optional anyway), 2015 drops you straight into some reasonably complex menus, where the closest the game gets to a story mode is the ‘team’ mode, which couldn’t really be more straight-laced if it tried.

Any attempt to get you care about your team and team-members has been brushed aside in favour of dense pieces of text and endless stats menu screens.

Gameplay:

Once you get over the endless options, there are three main gameplay modes to this latest Tour De France offering. There are a number of time-trial challenges where you take on downhill sprints against the clock. Then there’s the aforementioned team mode, where there’s actually a fair bit of strategy available for what is ostensibly a sports game rather than a management sim. You can play it in a very similar way to the main Tour mode, but to do so seems like a bit of a waste as all it adds are yet more menus and a number of qualifying stages.

Then there’s the ‘Tour De France’ mode, which allows you to play through all of the official stages of the tour, or select from a variety of the stages. You can even select a number of stages to complement your rider if you want to concentrate on the sprints or hill climbs, for example. Mostly the game uses the license well, with a few flashy videos here and there, but the lack of all the riders being represented (including British stars Mark Cavendish and Chris Froome) is pretty disappointing.