View Shred 2 - ft Sam Pilgrim achievements, leaderboards, DLC, reviews + more.

I’ve said it a few times now, as well as in my review for it, that I like the Trials games. The 2.5D racing style, lining up onto the next obstacle and the fast-flowing nature of hitting the top times and then some. When it works, it works well.

1. Ride as Mountain Bike legend Sam Pilgrim, and use the advanced trick system to bust out insane combos in over 40 hand crafted levels. Created out of passion by a solo developer, Shred! 2 is the most authentic MTB gaming experience available!
2. Sam Pilgrim Review – Now With Added Sam Pilgrim! By admin On May 13, 2020. Sometimes I miss the clarity of being on a mountain bike.

But what halted Trials Rising in its career progression wasn’t down to just finishing levels in good times anymore, it was its ridiculous live service/career component. You could nail a track in record time and get a gold or platinum medal, and it wouldn’t be as prestigious as it used to be.

I use that comparison because Shred! 2 follows a similar beat. It doesn’t matter how fast or perfectly you finish some tracks; if you haven’t pulled a 360° backflip off of an obstacle, you ain’t progressing. Such is the challenge(s) on some of the tracks that it grinds any progression to a halt, bringing my enjoyment of it to a similar level.

When it works, it works well. The riding is fluid, the bikes handle well enough and the trick system is simple yet fun. But is its absolutely backwards approach to continuing enough to kill it for me? Let’s saddle up and find out…

Flying High… Or Not, As Can Be The Case

The concept behind Shred!’s gameplay is pretty simple: you ride as Sam Pilgrim, and only Sam Pilgrim, as you start a run at the top and make your way to bottom in both speed and style.

The first few levels of the main career act as the tutorial, and as such, the mechanics of hitting the right lines and maintaining speed throughout. This is done through pumping, a knack that takes some getting used to. The process is pretty straightforward: you hold A whilst airborne, holding it as you land and release at the peak of a jump. Much like OlliOlli, this rhythm ensures that you hit the right lines and nail jumps properly.

Which, sadly, becomes one of Shred!’s downfalls. Missing that perfect landing can kill your speed completely. Fortunately, you can pedal, but this only applies to flat or downhill sections. If you’ve got an uphill jump to clear, you’re shafted. Which means, unlike Trials, you have to start the whole run away. Granted, a checkpoint would be a difficult, again for the lack of momentum, but it is infuriating to restart every single time because of one mistake.

Thankfully, most of the courses can be done in about thirty seconds. The basic premise is fluidity and speed, getting that pumping rhythm right and not being put off your stroke…*snigger*.

And when it works, it works well. Bombing down a hill only to soar high before lining that landing up and doing it again is a simple pleasure, made all the better through practice. It’s just marred by the complete lack of leeway if you balls a landing up halfway through a course. Whilst it harkens back to the “practice makes perfect” mantra we should all know by now, it can be infuriating to be near the end and literally be unable to clear the last ramp.

It’s Not All Downhill From Here…

Thankfully, there are more styles of course than just downhill sprints. Keeping it more grounded in reality than Trials or OlliOlli, the career mode throws in some flatter, trick-based levels too.

These focus more on the technical aspect of all-terrain biking by giving you flatter, obstacle-based runs instead. Ledges and flattops give rise to manual challenges (as in, a bike manual, where you balance on solely the front or back wheel), or more trick opportunities in massive jumps or drops. For these, you switch out your full suspension bike for a hardtail (read: just front suspension) but it’s more of a cosmetic addition than anything.

However, these tracks all fall under the same trappings of the racing ones: bar the occasional speed/point-based challenges, the criteria for some fall under a ridiculously strict quota. Of course, they do vary: early courses will just ask to you backflip off of a certain obstacle or ramp, which is easy enough. But when you’re asked to front flip and do a tweaked trick, which means holding the trick for longer, on a jump or drop with a smaller airtime it becomes much harder.

It wouldn’t be so bad if you could come back to these after you’ve progressed further, but you need a certain amount of stars (that each challenge rewards you with) to unlock courses. Again, requirements start quite low, but the further you go the count gets higher. So if you’ve been cruising by on one or two challenges per level, you’re going to have to go back and proverbially get good. It’s that that absolutely kills the joy for me in places.

Hold On To Your Bu… Your Handlebars

Yet the biggest twist in this review is that despite my protestations, I actually quite like Shred! 2. Sure, the progression concept sucks more fun out of the game than a flat tyre, but once you can get into the grind it’s a fun, if endearing game.

Naturally, no one is going to ace every challenge on their first attempt. Once you get used to the pumping and line mechanic, you start to ahead of your line where a jump is going to be, or when to hunker down as you land into a smooth landing. The challenges, obtuse as they can be, are actually highlighted in each course as to where to pull them off. Though they may range from pulling a certain trick or clearing a gap, they’re numbered so at any time you can pause the game and see what you need to do.

The core of the game, much like Pumped BMX, is repetition and getting better. But it’s not just the practice that’ll make you better, it’s also your arsenal of rides that can help things too. Whilst the bikes only comes in two types, downhill or hardtrail trick bikes, there’s about half a dozen of each to unlock along the way. Of course, these are also unlocked with challenge progression, so the fruits of your labour also pay off in that regard.

With each new bike comes a varying amount of stats, from speed to spin, that you’ll need to play around with and get the best feel for on certain tracks. It adds a small degree of depth to those who go looking for it, if you’ve got a challenge that needs more rotations on a backflip or a fastest time tied to them. Some of the stats are nominally incremental and don’t affect the overall gameplay too much, but for the perfectionist, it’s all there for you to play with. If you’re feeling particularly fancy, you can customise each bike in a wild array of colours to suit your playstyle. Neon pink bike take your fancy? Go nuts.

Bumps, Broken Bones and Everything In Between

Yet however exciting you want to make your ride, the same can’t be said for the rider himself. Sam Pilgrim, the face of the game, only comes in one flavour of boring: from his barely customisable outfit to his terrible voice over contributions.

I get that this was a small budget title, but Sam’s (if it is him at all) cheers and encouragement sound completely phoned in. I mean that in the literal sense; he could have recorded them as WhatsApp voice memos for how awful they sound. I would just as rather have had no vocal track than the lasklustre level of recording in these. Yes, that sounds old man-ish and grumpy, but honestly, check the trailer out if you don’t believe me:

Vocal criticism aside, there is a good game here. It may suffer from an unnecessarily steep difficulty climb (which is ironic for a downhill mountain bike game) that really tests the whole “one more go” philosophy to breaking point, but the good intent is there.

Much like OlliOlli, Trials or Pumped BMX, you’re never going to master it straight away. Every game has a degree of repetition to it, that’s a given. But in some of these courses, ranging from lush woodlands to alpine halfpipes, it’s more the specific nature of each challenge that’ll make or break some people.

If you can get past that and seek a new type of challenge, then you can’t go far wrong with Shred! 2. It has indie title written all over it, so if you can appreciate it at that arcade level and price point, it’s definitely worth a look for those that want to push themselves. It’ll push you and you’ll get mad at times (please, do. I can’t be the only one that gets annoyed), but if you can persevere until you unlock new rides to help, it opens up the challenge with progression and practice.

7/10

Barring its initial difficulty, Shred! 2 opens into a fun little take on MTB and trick-based riding skills. You just need to practice… a lot.

Shred! 2 ft. Sam Pilgrim is available now on PS4, Xbox (reviewed on), PC, Android and Apple stores.

Developer: ASBO Interactive
Publisher: ASBO Interactive

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional code from the publisher. For our full review policy, please go here.

If you enjoyed this article or any more of our content, please consider our Patreon.

Sometimes I miss the clarity of being on a mountain bike hurtling down a hill, swerving around trees, carving up berms and nailing jumps. I miss that beautiful clarity where your entire mind shrinks down to a single, overwhelming thought: this is going to really fucking hurt. And it does. It really, really does. I loved downhill mountain biking, but I hated going back up the hills and I was never all that good at it, so I gave up the sport before it forced me to give up on having all my bones intact. Happily I can live vicariously through videogames, so here I am reviewing Shred 2! Ft. Sam Pilgrim.

The game only features Sam Pilgrim in the sense that it has a vaguely humanoid creature on the bike. If you squinted hard enough it could possibly resemble Sam Pilgrim, I suppose, but unless someone told me it was him I would never have realised. Other than that there’s about four lines of poorly recorded lines from Sam Pilgrim himself that get played over and over. None of this is a knock on Sam Pilgrim himself who is an utter legend in the mountain biking scene and a man I’d love to meet. But if you come into Shred 2! hoping for a real look at the man himself, I’d recommend checking out his Youtube channel instead.

At first, you might think Shred 2! is the like Ubisoft’s Trials series, since it takes place in 2.5 dimensions. You can left to right or right to left, and you balance your bike using the analogue stick. However, once you get going Shred 2! is nothing like the Trials series, least of all because you don’t have an engine to drag yourself out of trouble with.

Like actual mountain biking the key skill to speed is keeping your momentum up, and Shred 2! does a fun job of replicating that idea. Fail to keep the flow going and you’ll most likely fall short on a critical jump. It’s for this reason there’s no mid-track save points. Don’t worry, though; each track tends to be 30-seconds to a minute-long, so restarting the whole thing isn’t a daunting prospect. And you will have to restart because getting a feel for a track’s layout and flow is often key to making it to the finish line. On some of the early courses you can fumble your way to the end on the first run, but on most of them it’s rare to make it on the first go.

To keep your momentum going you have to master the ancient and noble art of pumping, which I swear isn’t as sexual as it sounds, unless you want it to be. Basically pumping means pushing the bike into the ground on downhill slopes before letting the weight off on the uphill. Get it right and you can build up piles of speed without having to peddle. Shred 2! replicates this by getting you to hold down A to pump. You can use it in the air, too, to shove the bike down toward the ground, thereby lessening the time spent hurtling through the sky. This is where Shred 2! shines, the moments where you and the track just click and you barrel through the whole thing, nailing every landing, take-off and pumping opportunity.

Annoyingly though, the button to bunnyhop is also the same one to pump. In a few situations this can lead to an awkward moment where you try to switch from pumping to a quick hop and the game doesn’t register your input.

In fact, controls in general are a problem for Shred 2, which is unfortunate in a game all about going fast and needing everything to be nice and tight. By shoving the right stick in a direction you can perform tricks, vital for building up points. Unfortunately there’s a notable delay between the input and the trick actually starting. It’s worse when you attempt to go from one trick to another during a jump as there’s quite a gap between one trick animation finishing and the next one beginning. It makes judging whether you can wedge another trick in annoyingly difficult.

The way you progress through the game is by completing various challenges to get stars. It starts off nice and easy, maybe a star here for doing a tailwhip off a drop and another for beating a certain time. Before long though, things become a lot more challenging, like that tailwhip becoming a 720 double backflip tailwhip off of a tiny drop. You’ll need to run each track multiple times to nail them because a single mistake will screw everything up. Plus, a challenge is only deemed completed if you actually make it to the end of a stage without ploughing your face into the dirt. You’ll need to restart, try again and realize that instead of focusing on performing the challenge itself you need to actually focus on nailing the tricky section before it so that you can carry enough speed. I like this focus on replaying a track until you figure out the rhythm, but the fact that further events are locked away until you can get enough stars might piss some folk off, especially as the game rarely ever gives you a star just for getting to the finish line.

The stages are spread out across four locations such as the UK and the USA. You kick off in a training area before heading out to the Alpine area, then the UK before finishing up in the USA. Each one has a distinct visual style and play style, like how the USA is much more urban and has more technical, trials style riding. You’ll be linking tricks with lengthy manuals, making it play more like Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX.

You even get a few different bikes as you rack up the stars. My personal favourite is the chunky downhill beast named the Juggernaut. The newest unlocked bike isn’t always the best one to do the job though. After all, some bikes can’t do specific tricks, something which you might not even realize until a challenge asks you to perform a tailwhip even though it doesn’t show up on the trick list.

Shred 2 – Ft Sam Pilgrim Switch

Given the style of game Shred 2 is the lack of any form of online leaderboards for times and scores is completely baffling to me. I’d love to see how friends and strangers are doing on tracks compared to myself. And I’d especially love to be able to race against their ghosts like you can in the Trials series.

Shred 2! is actually a sneaky mobile game in disguise having been ported over to consoles. It’s not a good port, either; this is a crap game to look at. In fact, at a glance I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought Shred 2! came from the Playstation 2 era. The textures are muddy and lack any sort of detail, the riding animations are practically non-existent and trick animations are stiff, and the transitions where the game switches the line you’re riding on feel and look horrible. Plus, you ride merrily ride straight through giant boulders and planks of wood like they don’t exist. Even the menus look poor. In short, this as basic a port as you can get.

It feels unfair to rag on the game so much though. Shred 2! is made by one guy and a friend who leant some coding help. If you can accept the limitations that come with that, then there is fun to be had. It’s the kind of game I could see attracting a small but hardcore group of fans who are willing to put in the time and have the patience to work with its flaws. Hell, I’d probably myself in that camp because while at first I honestly disliked Shred 2! it grew on me like some sort of hideous growth. Once the clumsy controls click with you and you begin to learn the game’s many quirks it becomes genuinely fun, challenging and satisfying to play.

Shred 2 - Ft Sam Pilgrim Church

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