Trials HD (Xbox 360)

When I was at school my favourite Saturday morning TV programme was a motocross trials show called Kickstart, which was half an hour of people riding over cars, balancing on logs and falling over in extremely painful, yet funny ways. I always wanted to have a go for myself but decided against it because I like my knees to keep bending one way only, so now RedLynx have kindly released a brilliant 3D game based on this theme I can take part in the bone-crunchery and still be able to walk to the shops afterwards.

Trials HD is a great looking Xbox Live Arcade only title that packs in a series of dramatic and hellishly difficult motocross tracks, a handful of tournaments and a collection of entertaining extras which we'll come to later. All this can be yours for the piffling price of 1200 of your MS points or about eleven quid in real money, and about 200mb worth of download.

The game is simplicity itself to play; you have one trigger for speeding up, another for slowing down, and a stick to throw your weight backwards and forwards. That's it. Your success rests on your ability to balance your motorbike through a series of jumps, flips and obstacles, which get progressively more evil over the course of five difficulty levels. You'll start off with a couple of tutorials that'll teach you the finer points of power and weight transfer, and before long you'll be balancing on giant metal balls, backflipping through piles of exploding barrels and careering downhill on rickety minecarts. Well, when I say you'll be doing that, I really mean you'll be swearing at your screen and cursing the developers. Trials HD is seriously tough.

Frustrating though it might be at times, you can't accuse it of being unfair. It's like EAs Skate in that the physics are spot on, the controls are extremely precise and you have the ability to do everything right from the start, but how well you manage to do it is all down to practise and finesse. That said, the 'extreme' levels will seriously test you, to the point where even getting over the first obstacle seems impossible. Once you do get over it though, it's onwards and upwards because Trials HD peppers each level with checkpoints so you don't have to head back to the start after each fall. You can almost approach it like a series of puzzles where the only penalties for failing are that you lose a bit of time and log one failed attempt. As a measure of how tough it can get, you have a limit of 30 minutes and 500 failed attempts to beat each track, and on the later levels, you will hit both of these limits more than once.

As you get faster and learn to nail the obstacles with fewer fail attempts, you'll start to earn medals which will unlock new tracks, bikes, tournaments and a series of skill games. These games are entertaining little diversions that you can play for the fun of it outside of the main levels. Don't expect to take them seriously because the activities on offer include launching off your bike and down a flight of stairs to score broken bones, pulling wheelies with a loose front wheel and flying through hoops of fire with an afterburner attached to your exhaust pipe. If you've ever played the minigames in the racing title Flatout you'll know what to expect. They're silly but a nice added extra to keep you going. The tournaments you'll unlock collect together groups of tracks from the various difficulty levels and ask you to complete the whole run within in a tight time limit and a low number of failed attempts.

Once you've mastered all of the levels (which will take longer than you think) you might want to have a go at the incredibly flexible level editor. This runs in two modes - a simple one with a limited number of obstacles, and an advanced mode that adds a pile of extra building blocks and allows all sorts of clever triggers and events to be added. It's one of the most powerful creation tools I've seen and will be well worth the time it takes to master it. The downside is that you can only share tracks with the people in your friend list, but I'd be amazed if this didn't change in the future.

Trials HD is one of the slickest titles to come from the Live Arcade stable, and easily beats a lot of retail titles that'll cost you four times as much. It's a fantastic package and one you'd be a fool to miss. Just remember to use a wired controller, as wireless ones are a lot easier to throw through the TV..