Despite covering a good bunch of sports and racing games, here at XboxEra we never really got around to dive into Nacon’s cycling franchise, Tour De France. With the 2024 installment upon us, let’s see what their videogame, based on the most famous cycling race of them all, has on offer for us on Series X. This is Tour De France 2024!
It’s peloton time!
The first thing to point out about this franchise, recently under Nacon’s increasingly vast banner of racing IPs, is that it’s neither a classic racer nor a manager style game – Tour De France 2024 sits somewhere between the two. The players, naturally, get to ride their bike, of which direction and speed they need to manage themselves, but speed and precision itself doesn’t get you far – it’s all about strategically managing the riders’ energy levels while not sacrificing the performance too much, to allow them to reach the end in an optimal fashion. As anyone who’s ever rode a bike race can tell you, this sport is nothing like racing with cars, where slamming the gas doesn’t really take more energy from the driver than coasting. Cyclists’ stamina and energy levels, however, are crucial in such events, and there’s many tricks they can do to reduce the fatigue and effort to ensure enough physical battery remains to get a good finish.
Going at maximum speed at all times is a strategy that ensures that we run out of energy very early on, and thus, the nature of the race itself has to be used to our advantage to minimize consumption. Peloton racing is the main key, where competitors can closely stick behind another rider (or more of them) to reduce the drag and catch a slipstream, drastically decreasing the effort needed to keep up. In this game, pressing the X button allows the player to “latch” onto another player with ease, so that even the ones with a controller in hand can take a little break and no longer have to manually manage the speed and direction, adapting automatically to the bycicle in front instead. Cyclists can also stop pedaling and lean when on a downhill segment, which allows them to be fast while relaxing their muscles and catching a breath. The game offers two different coloured batteries the players can recharge once per event, but going to the max drains these resources insanely quick – players need to be smart as to when to push, and not get greedy when they see a pack farther away that needs to be caught. Keep that peloton racing going, and sprint only when truly necessary. And when the downhill segment finally arrives, the pain and anxiety all goes away, allowing us to really sprint without fear. It feels great.
I’ll manage, somehow
But that in itself doesn’t sound like anything too out of the ordinary for a racer. After all, even in Formula 1 games, players will need to closely monitor fuel and tyre consumption, employing tricks to reduce their wear while trying not to compromise laptimes and track position too much. But in most races, players have to manage an entire team of riders under the same banner, and they have two distinct ways of doing this. One is giving orders – when playing offline, the game can be effectively time-frozen, which allows players to dictate, via initially somewhat confusing icons, which cyclist needs to do what exactly. Do you want to send someone ahead towards the next pack? Do you want a teammate of yours to lead your peloton, so that some other, potentially more capable riders can relax a bit and have more stamina for the end? But the decision-making doesn’t end there…
In this segment, players can go one step further and effectively take control of any other team member, regardless of where they are located on the track. If you feel like they’re not following your orders optimally or you think you could do their deeds more efficiently, nothing stops you from stepping a bit into their shoes and get the action going yourself – giving, obviously, the control back to the AI for the cyclist you were using until that point. So what’s it gonna be? Sacrifice everybody for the glory of a single athlete, or make a consistent team effort and guarantee a solid finish for just about everyone in the team? This is where the manager side of the title comes into play, and when the steep uphill segments arrive and the energy levels are going down rapidly, it’s time for some difficult decisions.
Pogacar? More like “pog, a bike”, am I right?
A huge flaw in previous years’ titles by Nacon was the complete lack of proper online racing. Sure, leaderboards existed, as did a handful of timed challenges which still are around, but in 2024’s game it’s finally possible to hop online and play against real people, head-to-head, giving further spice to the game’s stages. This mode is limited to only 6 players, so forget the absolute chaotic traffic of a stage 1 start, but perhaps it’s for the best – judging by how people generally behave in online racing games, having a lower amount of them may not be a bad thing at all. For what it’s worth, the netcode seems sound, but it’s a barely customizeable and certainly very limited forage into the world of multiplayer. At least it’s here, and it’s pretty fun anyway.
Players can also play freely offline, being able to jump into just about any stage of Tour De France, including the starting segments in Italy. Be it in the full event, proper championships or even individual stages, players can hop on solo or part of a group into just about any stage, even if most of them are visually and mechanically very similar. You see, road surfaces are always pretty much the same, and even the curve geometry within a stage is reused a lot. Also, those who want to take on the challenges, the ups and downs of a Tour De France stage but without the other cyclists around, there’s a neat time trial mode that reduces it all down to the bone – though, in this way, it shines further light on the game’s general mechanical shortcomings.
Okay, but is it a good game?
Not to brag, but I think I did a decent job at explaining how the basics work in Tour De France 2024, yet another yearly installment of an atypical racing franchise. The strategic depth is certainly there, and mechanisms not really seen in racers are abundantly present, giving this title an aura of uniqueness through and through. At the same time, the game does seem to have a lower budget than most license-based sports games, and this shines through in just about every aspect. Questionable menu designs and UI choices, low-resolution and not very detailed 3D models and textures that really wouldn’t feel out of place in a game from 2 or 3 console generations ago. The handling is extremely basic, with invisible walls blocking off the outside of every single road and therefore drastically reducing the risk of entering a turn too quick, with a very approximative and forgiving physics model in play as well. The invisible walls can even be crashed into at high speed without any real penalty, making certain tight turns way too easy. It indeed feels like the actual part of riding the bikes is a secondary aspect over the managerial aspect of keeping all riders’ energy levels steady – an interesting mechanism that, however, gets a bit stale after already a couple hours of similar races.
Ultimately, Tour De France 2024 is yet another yearly installment of Nacon’s racing/managing franchise, based on the most notable cycling event of the year. A rather poor presentation, handling and physics make the actual act of riding not a particularly exciting one, though the pretty deep strategic options given by the peloton racing make for a compelling and unusual racing experience that’s worth a try. Proper multiplayer is finally present as well, albeit limited to 6 players, making this the best entry point to the series thus far. I also feel that such a level of micromanaging only truly caters to big fans of this discipline, whereas newcomers will find an otherwise rather poor racer where managing energy levels is far more important than… well, riding well. Tour De France 2024 isn’t for everyone, and it feels somewhat poorly made in a lot of areas, but it’s still an interesting game for cycling fans who, especially on console, don’t have a lot to pick from anyway.
Tour De France 24
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Highly strategic racing
- The pleasure of the fast downhill after a long uphill
- Massive peloton packs are always fun to navigate in
CONS
- Technically extremely outdated
- Very basic handling and physics, with invisible walls everywhere
- Limited online mode
