Welcome to our yearly review of the only cycling game that really matters, Tour de France 2022.
Fight for the yellow jersey in the official game of the Tour de France 2022. Experience the new online mode with weekly challenges and leaderboards. In Solo mode, you can now deal with incidents (injuries, illnesses) during the 92 stages available. Enjoy a new challenge each week, competing against players from all over the world as you try to reach the top of the leaderboard! The controllable team and objectives – e.g. win the overall classification, score more points in mountain stages – differ based on the race.
You can now choose to enable or disable race incidents and their consequences. If you enable them (for yourself and your opponents or just your opponents), you can choose their frequency and enable or disable their consequences, which vary depending on the incident’s severity: loss of power for a short or long duration, or even withdrawal. Be prepared to adapt because your strategy might need to be completely re-evaluated at any moment.
To add more unpredictability to races, a new preparation system has been added. Five random cyclists (from your team or in the peloton) will be especially well prepared for the race and five others may potentially underperform. Unfortunately, you can’t know who these cyclists will be… You will need to keep an eye on all your opponents.
To make the cobbled sections of races more immersive, we have added shuddering to the entire user interface. This new feature reflects the difficulty of cobbled sections. You have never experienced the Arenberg trench quite like this! In Tour de France 2022, the races are more intense than ever, with even bigger early breakaways and better collaboration in all breakaways. You will need to adapt your strategy accordingly!
When I say this is the only one that matters, I am not dissing any other cycling games! This is just the big one, it is like you love action adventure games and then you got games like Zelda, in its way, this is the Zelda of the game genre.
Straight from the start, there are many similarities to previous games, I felt like the tutorial was exactly the same. It probably was not, it just felt the exact same as last years’ version. What has clearly changed, the course itself obviously and it becomes very clear from the opening course, the time trial. Copenhagen is presented very well and yes, Copenhagen is not in France, the Tour pretty much always starts elsewhere as a cheap publicity stunt, but Copenhagen is awesome.
As you progress, you get to experience the virtual hardships of a course or just press the button to skip the manual courses and go full auto. While this game is as niche as can be, I guess the fans of this genre have another great game to look forward to.
In conclusion, Le Tour de France 2020 is maybe a niche game, but game technically, it just all works better than expected.
