I take this as the most powerfully negative post in this entire thread. Riders didn't have a difficulty curve; it had a difficulty 50 foot brick wall. My attempts to play it back at its release had me slamming into the wall no matter what I attempted to do on a gentle curve in the first stage. I was unable to even complete the first stage on the easiest difficulty level in an hour of attempts, said "fuck it" and played something else.
It's possible to have difficulty curve issues in an otherwise good game. Sonic 2's Chemical Plant 2 comes to mind immediately. This still doesn't prevent the player from learning how to play the game from the previous stages and eventually obtaining the skill necessary to complete the overly hard section. Games with a difficulty wall at the start don't have that luxury. Sonic Riders essentially has a sign at the entrance to the ride that says "you must already know all of these mechanics to play". Anyone that doesn't already know how Riders works is told they aren't wanted and quickly gives up and plays something else. That's not a way to get people to play your game, and of course any game that does this is going to get a lot of negative reviews.
From what I've been playing of it, it's kind of janky, but perfectly playable in spite of that. There are admittedly a lot of new concepts you need to wrap your head around, but most at least make sense on paper - the run button, the wall-running, having a "kick" button, auto-chaining homing attacks (you get more points/animals if you lock onto multiple enemies at once than you would by doing it one enemy at a time, the
Sonic Adventure way) - which just leaves a little bit of experimentation to see what works and what doesn't. It's
nowhere near as bad as
Riders, where you have to understand the air and trick mechanics if you want to get anywhere in the game; the first few stages are fairly playable without fully getting all the mechanics down.
It helps if you remember to pause the game when the ? icon shows up so you can read the hints, though, because you're not gonna get what information they have otherwise (admittedly most of it's kind of obvious shit like "collect rings to not die", but they also hide things like the ability to rev the spindash and keep the speed indefinitely if you don't mind the loss in control). They really could've delivered information on how to play the game in a better fashion.
The bigger problem, that my friends at GAF are telling me about, is that the levels take a serious nosedive in quality soon after where I am (I just finished Tropical Coast Act 2 - or World 3-2, if you prefer - and apparently it dives somewhere in Frozen Factory), and it doesn't really get better thereafter. There are a lot more gimmicky stages that don't really mesh with the core gameplay, and from what I've been told, the final few stages straight up reuse assets from earlier levels. Sky Road and Lava Mountain come up semi-regularly as examples of how bad it gets.
That said, they say the highs are much higher and the lows are much lower, so the average is just kind of "well, that certainly was a
thing". I'll be able to form my own opinion on the matter better once I finish the game personally.
It's worth a rental. I'm not sure I'd advocate buying it, just yet, though.