8 to Glory – The Official Game of the PBR (Xbox One)
When it comes to major sports leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB, you can expect a tie-in game yearly, but for some lesser known niche leagues, there might not even be a single video game capturing the sport. This is what 8 to Glory – The Official Game of the PBR sought to finally rectify, the sport of Professional Bull Riding not only getting captured in interactive digital entertainment but featuring the real life athletes, which according to the PBR’s classification includes both the riders and the bulls due to both having such an integral role in the action.
The name 8 to Glory refers to the amount of time a rider needs to stay aboard a bucking bull in order to earn points. If a rider is thrown before then they’ll earn no points for the round and after 8 seconds have passed it doesn’t matter what happens as priorities shift to safely separating rider and ride. Despite being more of a niche form of athletic entertainment, the PBR is alive and popular enough to have a foothold in both North and South America as well as in places like Australia, so to tie in with the 2018 bull riding season, 40 real life riders were chosen for inclusion in the game from these regions. Similarly, 30 real bulls were chosen for inclusion in the game, but there is a bit of an oddity involving their inclusion. While the commentator will say the names of the riders and bulls before a round, the bulls Smooth Over and Smooth Operator are both referred to only as “a tough bull”. It is a touch odd the announcer made such an oversight, but the announcer in general isn’t integrated in the best way, often repeating the same lines during a round with only a single variant or two for a situation despite bull riding being a quick sport with many back to back rides.
When a round of bull-riding begins, the arena will be introduced, the game featuring 17 locations that are all almost entirely identical. They’ll hang different flags on the wall, but otherwise you won’t really be able to tell the difference between something like the Madison Square Garden in New York City and an arena in a much smaller town like Nampa, Idaho. Once you’re on the bull though, the background won’t be quite as important, but despite the nominal goal being to sit atop a bull successfully for 8 seconds while it tries to throw you, a single ride does take a bit longer. First and before you are even let out of the pen to start the ride you do a small minigame where you adjust your grip on the bull. Three meters, each with a sweet spot placed differently and of different sizes, will rapidly fill, the player needing to press A with the right timing to get their grip as tight as possible. You are able to retry the grip adjustment as much as you like for a thirty second period, but the grip’s effect on your ride is subtle and also hard to even really gauge.
Scoring in the PBR is tied to the performance of the rider and the difficulty of the bull, both making up about half of the final earned points. A bull will provide a little above 40 points while a rider who manages to stay on their mount the whole 8 seconds is going to likely earn about the same, meaning most scores are going to be somewhere between 80 and 90 points. With decimal scoring in the picture the minutiae of your ride can be what sets your score apart from a rider who did rather similarly, although unless you’re competing against another human you’ll never see your opponents ride and only get to see their points on the scoreboard. The competitions in the 27 mission long campaign mode have you ride multiple bulls back to back with your total score determining who wins the day, and interestingly enough your opponents almost never manage to stay on their ride the whole event. This means so long as you stay aboard every bull you can usually win the competition, but you can also recover from being bucked off so long as your score squeaks above the next best bull rider.
Once the pen opens for a ride, the first half is going to involve a small minigame involving a white ring. The ring rapidly closes in below the bucking bull’s hooves, the player needing to time a press of RB for when it is in an indicated zone to maintain control. At the same time, you’ll need to press the control stick right or left to lean in the appropriate direction. You’ll spend most of this portion staring at the ring though, but luckily you don’t need to watch the rider to adjust as the sides of the screen will start flashing orange to give you more visible indicators on how to lean without needing to split your attention in a dangerous way. The speed of this can make things feel rather exciting at first as it does at least capture the split second adjustments one might need on an unpredictable animal, but not only is it easy to become accustomed to this portion since you’ll be riding so many bulls over the course of the game, it’s actually not too influential towards how well you stay aboard the bull. A few times while trying to intentionally throw myself off the bull I set myself to 0 grip out of a possible 300 and then held only to the left during this portion of the ride, but my rider was squarely affixed and even failing multiple RB presses during a normal ride doesn’t seem to jeopardize your position at all. Naturally your score will be affected by doing poorly here but simply staying aboard the bull is still more important than anything, and there’s only one portion of the ride where falling off really seems to be in danger of happening.
Somewhere around 5 or 6 seconds into the ride, time will slow down as the bull is told to input a “combo”. What is actually happening is the game is picking a somewhat random set of button presses the player is going to have to press quickly and in time with when they line up with certain indicators on screen. When the bull is setting the combo though you actually don’t need to press anything and it’s almost a bit of a break, but there is still something important going on as you get to see the rhythm with which you’ll need to press the buttons once it is your turn. Some of these are slow enough that you shouldn’t have trouble while others have almost no space between them and thus you’ll need to be fast and attentive to have a hope of pressing all the buttons in time. Do too poorly here and the bull will throw you off now, but there is at least some importance to your performance during the first four seconds that emerges here. You and the bull are jostling for control of a meter near the top of the screen, and the more blue there is in it, the more “life” you have for this pivotal moment. If you make mistakes during the input segment, the blue in the bar will deplete, and once its fully red the bull will throw you. So long as you have blue to spare you can make it out of this moment and finish up your ride. However, even in those rounds where I was trying to lose I could still end up with enough blue to survive this segment if I tried to match the combo, the bull’s aggression with the speed of the inputs not always seeming to be tied to how much red was in the bar either. This does mean most bull rides are going to be a gamble on whether or not the bull’s going to give you a fast or slow combo to beat and the rest of the ride does feel a little insignificant for it.
After the combo there is a brief period where you’re back to the original form of riding until the clock hits 8 seconds, and while adjusting yourself back to it quickly could have been an interesting complication to keep in mind, you’re still mostly safe and really only need to be attentive to earn a few more fractions of a point. With these quick, similar bull rides making up all the action in the game it is a bit disheartening to realize that it all comes down to the combo repeating button press section where the difficulty is almost always more from the speed than the actual actions being taken, the initial air of excitement draining more and more as the rides become rote and the scoring system doesn’t allow for enough dramatic variation. The impact of your individual actions in a ride are hard to parse even with some symbols meant to indicate different elements of the ride, and what’s more, the campaign mode actually doesn’t require you to win any single event, the next level unlocking regardless of your placement.
The incentive for winning an event though would be the cash prizes, the game having you spend in-game currency to buy booster packs with random helpful cards inside. Luckily no real money purchases are possible so it’s all about doing well to get more cash for more packs, the cards inside including both appropriate cowboy-themed equipment to up your rider’s stats to give them a small push towards more points as well as there being cards for each rider which can upgrade them to have better inherent stats. While the campaign mode is similar in design across all riders, the progress in it is tied to each one, meaning you can’t swap partway through even if you keep getting cards to upgrade someone else. Oddly enough though, while I did try to start the campaign with one rider, restarting an event lead to it automatically swapping me to the default athlete Cody Nance who got the victory instead of Valdiron de Oliveira. Individual stats again have an almost imperceptible boost to your score and the vital combo section can still throw fast or slow segments at you even on supposedly ornery bulls so statistics don’t really seem to matter much, although if you are going for the achievement-tied belt buckles with their special conditions like earning a score of 90, every little boost does help even if it doesn’t change the repetitive design of the rides. There is an arcade mode where you can ride bulls in single ride instances to make earning certain buckles easier and it can even be played in multiplayer where someone controls the bull and can set the combo, but it’s not like the extra goals or weak two player competition really draw out anything new from a game based around a single repeated burst of quick action over and over again.
THE VERDICT: The first time you climb aboard a bull in 8 to Glory – The Official Game of the PBR can be a wild and thrilling ride, but since all the game has to offer is the same bull riding action again and again, you quickly begin to see the cracks. Most rides come down to the combo section where the almost arbitrary speed of the inputs required prove more important than any other element of the round and the scoring has such subtle differentiation that it can be hard to see how your actions impact it. Even with the equipment and rider upgrades it still doesn’t seem like your scores are being impacted too much and simply staying aboard every bull will win you the campaign. The ferocity of the bucking bull contrasts with the actual shallow process of staying atop it, the speed of the inputs meant to distract you from how little is really going on in this less than effective attempt to adapt the niche sport.
And so, I give 8 to Glory – The Official Game of the PBR for Xbox One…
A BAD rating. Perhaps bull-riding enthusiasts might accept the repetition in favor of this rare adaptation of their sport of choice, but once the curtain is pulled back on how the rides actually unfold it does take a bit of the wind from the game’s sails. If sloppy riding is only really punished during that key moment when the button combo comes into play it makes an already short ride feel even leaner in its offerings, especially since the jockeying for control before the combo is mostly just about where the life bar lands in terms of how much energy you have for the combo section. The points system is trying to be true to life no doubt but also it’s hard to really make out the difference between rides that have differences in decimal points, especially since the small actions while riding are hard to keep track of in the midst of things. You don’t really get to watch the rider or the bull too much during the ride since you’re watching the ring most of all although a post-ride replay at least gives you some slowed down highlights, but the feeling of the ride shifts from intense to commonplace as you become overly familiar with its systems and there’s never anything unexpected to shake it up save those times the combo is insanely fast. The card system’s small impact just ties back to the game feeling like it tries to squeeze too much out of a game made up entirely of short burst play where you can’t influence your fate too much outside of one key moment, but that might just be why there aren’t many bull-riding games out there. Making 8 seconds of action feel interactive and nuanced and staving off the inherently repetitious nature of it is no easy feat, and at least this adaptation of the PBR mostly just wears thin the more you understand it rather than being truly broken.
Truly translating the sport of bull-riding into an interactive digital form unsurprisingly took the form of minigame-inspired button press challenges in 8 to Glory – The Official Game of the PBR, but they do at least feel somewhat rooted in the idea of the sport even if the execution comes up short in terms of delivering challenging and varied action. Specific complications layered over short bursts of action did need some more variance or more involved interaction from the player to stave off the toll of doing the same thing repeatedly, especially since it quickly reveals the shallowness of certain moments of the ride and shows they didn’t even have enough voice lines from the announcer to make things feel nominally different. The bulls may look different, but the bull riding in PBR’s official game ends up predictable and cookie cutter, essentially denying the player the element that makes riding such unruly animals so exciting in real life.