Much like other sports games, Le Tour De France is its own franchise of sports games about competitive biking in the annual Le Tour De France racing event. You compete with other racers to win… well a lot of races!  And to be quite honest that is uh… about as far as we go with that.

While most racing and even some sports games will give you a lot of customizable options and fast paced gameplay, Tour De France is a bit more of an endurance, laid back experience that basically comes down to how long you can keep yourself invested in it, and a little bit of strategic maneuvering. So let’s talk about how it plays.

Gameplay

So instead of controlling only one individual for starters, you’re actually managing the entire team of cyclists. You’ll have to make all of your team work together to get the gold medal for races, which is an interesting departure from typical racing games. You will of course, control each racer individually, but it is an interesting way of keeping everyone up to speed and making sure no one falls too far behind in order to ensure victory.

Your stamina and energy are the key to winning, and management of it is vital. Climbing hills too fast and pedaling yourself out right at the beginning, spells doom for you by the end of the race. You regain energy by slowing down, trailing behind competitors, and keeping that, “Slow and steady wins the race,” mentality.

The controls are decent for a cycling game, with the triggers being used for pedaling and braking, the X button allows you to trail and keep up with a competitor, the A button allows you to tap it quickly for aggressive energy output, a command  center button that allows you to use energy regains and formation commands, and more.

You can also instantly switch from character to character on your team with the Y button, which is imperative to ensuring victory from all sides.

The HUD also displays terrain and speed, so you can monitor when you need to be exerting or conserving energy.

As stated before, slow and steady is typically how you win the missions in this game. It’s not about staying ahead. It’s more so about conserving and attacking at the right moments to get past everyone else.

Everything else

Graphically, the game isn't all that special, but certainly doesn't look bad. The environments pass for being realistic and pretty, but you’ll end up spending a lot more time looking at the roads than anything else really.

And that kind of leads us into where this game starts to fall short. Well, actually, short isn't the right word. More like incredibly long, and kind of boring. Races can drag on for quite some time, with the longest race I took part in taking almost 25 minutes. That is insane for someone that would much rather be going over 200MPH in a super-fast car.

There also just tends to be periods where literally nothing is happening. If you happen to get ahead and stay there for a while, you’re just going to be alone to basically your thoughts for a while, There isn't really any music or a whole lot of noise to keep you occupied, In fact, I ended up snapping a YouTube video and watched that while I was racing.

There is also the matter that, because there are so many bikers on the road, you'll find it hard to get ahead sometimes as well. These AI love to clump together in masses, and as much as you would love to, you can’t just bust through them and knock them all over. In fact, the lack of being able to mess with other players, while obviously realistic for the sport, was really unsatisfying.