Tour de France 2009 (Xbox Live Arcade) Demo Impressions

The Tour de France is a world famous cycling race around the whole of France. I feel like I had to say that, just in case there were people who didn’t know. For about a month, hundreds of cyclists in dozen of teams race to get the best overall time, with a grand finale in Paris. The race traverses cities, countryside, and dramatic mountain cols. It’s a huge spectacle and one I’ve been lucky enough to see many times from the side of the road. Tour de France 2009 is the official video game of the race and can be found on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 points.

In what is almost the complete opposite to what I expected, the game has you take more of a manager’s role. Likely explained by the fact that the game is made by the same people who make, and is essentially a cut down version of, Pro Cycling Manager. If I’m being honest, that game’s title does not sound exciting to me.

The game is, at it’s core, a simulation game. You pick a team (from a list of real Tour de France teams) and determine which riders you want to have in, and who to leave on the bench. Each rider has several stats relating to how good they on on a given terrain such as cobble stones or mountains. The final results show individual racer’s times as well as the team’s total time. There are other, points based, results but the demo doesn’t cover them so neither shall I.

The game boils down to patience and balancing. You control each of your team’s five riders one at a time during the race and switch between them using the triggers. You can use the bumpers to select and view stats of surrounding riders from other teams, if you so wish. Once you’ve picked a member of your team you can then tell them to follow, attack, or relay.

Following, as the name suggests, tells the rider to hang back and just follow whoever is in front. Attack triggers a small QTE where pressing A at the right time gives your chosen rider a boost, hopefully enough to sprint him clear of the group he’s with. Every rider has a small red ‘œResistance’ bar which fills up during the race, this is used when doing something strenuous like attacking. There is also a green ‘œStamina’ bar which goes down as the race progresses. If a rider is putting too much effort in and the Stamina runs out before the end of the race, he’ll suddenly loose a lot of speed.

Relaying is where a chain of riders take it in turn to lead. Due to aerodynamics and science and things, it’s easier to ride when behind somebody. This means riders can move faster if lined up one behind another. If set to relay, the rider makes his way to the front of the line, and after a couple of seconds, drops back to the end of the chain, thus relaying. You can adjust his relative effort here by a set percentage. A higher percentage burns more Stamina, but makes him and the group go faster.

Without complicating this description more, you have to balance the speed of your riders to be going fast enough to keep up with the main group, but not so fast as to burn out before the end of the race. Attacking at just the right time, and balancing all the right stats, can give you the edge in the closing few kilometres to clinch the victory.

If you’re at all interested in the sim aspect, then go and try the demo. Once I got the hang of what was actually going on it was genuinely fun to try and win a race or two. However if all of this has left you with an itchy trigger finger, best give it a miss.

The demo itself only has one stage rather than the 21 stages in the full Tour de France, and doesn’t have any multiplayer. It seems a shame not to have included both a normal stage and a time trial in the demo as the time trial, where you control one rider at a time, actually sounds more interesting.