Review: Rival Stars Horse Racing Desktop Edition — Gorgeous Graphics and Forgivable Flaws

Rival Stars Horse Racing is a horse racing game developed by New Zealand based company PikPok. The “Desktop Edition” follows the releases of Rival Stars Horse Racing on Android and iOS in 2018 and 2019, as well as a console version of the same game which is sold under the name of Phar Lap Horse Racing Challenge. Unlike the mobile game, the console version has not been updated since its release and does not seem to be directly in PikPok’s hand, but under the control of a partner company.  

Now, the popular horse racing game is coming to PC and Mac, to the delight of anyone preferring a premium experience over a free to play game with in-app purchases – including myself!

Can the Desktop Edition of Rival Stars offer the best of both worlds and become one of the rare few quality horse games available on PC? PikPok has been kind enough to send The Mane Quest an advance review key, so here is your chance to find out.

The opening cutscene is beautifully set in scene

Several jockey models are available to choose from

First Impressions

The game begins with a very pretty opening cutscene that introduces you to your family‘s nameless farm and horse racing business, fallen into disrepair after a deadly accident on the track. You meet your mentor Francis Kwan, horse trainer Trenton James, and stable manager Sophie Martin, the characters who will function as your guides and questgivers throughout.

After the voiced and animated cutscene, the story falls into the shape of text boxes and character images, with the narrative quickly taking a back seat compared to the gameplay itself.

My first persistent impression of said gameplay was how fast paced it is. With some introductory quests and brightly marked buttons to press, you quickly click your way through the game‘s basic mechanics: racing, training, breeding, expanding. While the horse racing is a fully three dimensional experience with its own controls and challenges, everything else happens via the User Interface and clicking, the actual upgrades and level ups happening fast and with satisfying audiovisual feedback, but without any additional mechanics or challenges.

The racing aside, this game is very much UI and click based. This will not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Rival Stars‘ mobile origins, but may not be self explanatory from the Steam page alone.

The initial play minutes are well tutorialized and easy to grasp.

Sprinting and positioning add some strategy to the racing.

Look and Feel

Time and time again on this website, I have reviewed games with horse models and animation anywhere between awful and mediocre, games that lack polish all around because they‘re made as cheaply as possible.

I am very happy to see that Rival Stars does not fit into that pattern: The horses look absolutely solid, in their stables, on the racetrack and in the pasture that makes up the main menu.

While the racing focus and lack of three dimensional interaction „at home“ means you‘ll rarely see your horses at a walk or trot, their movements are fluid and pretty throughout.

A weird detail remains that the horses‘ mouths are constantly open while running. To a layman, any picture of a horse with its mouth open may give the impression that horses just let their jaws drop sometimes, or even that they breathe through their mouth while running.

Both of that is false: horses cannot breathe through their mouths. That‘s what their big nostrils are for. Apart from eating, biting or yawning, they sometimes open their jaws to evade bit pressure, but the mouth does not just stay open unless there is a concrete reason for it. This random opening-and-closing that you see in Rival Stars actually detracts from realism rather than adding to it.

Am I nitpicking about the open mouths? Possibly. That’s what I do. Welcome to The Mane Quest.

Note the quality horse names.

Some extra praise goes to the foal animations on the other hand: they are utterly adorable, from their first attempts at standing on their feet, to their prancing around on the main menu pasture. They are good and I love them. 

Aside from the horses themselves, the game’s visuals also remain solid throughout: the environments and racetracks are pretty, the character art serves its purpose in communicating the occasional emotion. The game is nicely polished and provides audiovisual feedback for everything it needs to, which we all know is not often a given in our genre.

TMQ concludes that these babies are hella cute.

These menu animations add so much life despite no mechanical significance.

Racing

The heart of the game are the races: every race track that you unlock as you progress has its own nice little intro sequence and races have different lengths and ground attributes. 

While racing, the player can steer, brake and activate their sprint meter one ‘segment’ at a time. That horses have different preferences for ground consistency, race length and position within the field adds a bit of variety and strategy to your positioning, although the biggest factor in deciding a race’s outcome is your horse’s level and stats. 

If in your horse’s preferred position, sprint charges faster.

Hiring a jockey gives you the chance to watch the race from a spectator view

Music and visuals do their part in making the final stretch feel grand and important, and there is probably nothing more satisfying in the game than winning a race in a photo finish after having just pushed past your competitors by timing your sprints well.

If you don’t feel like playing out the whole race, you can hire a jockey and watch as a spectator or skip right to the results, which is helpful if you want to have your horses gather experience and safe time on long races. 

A source of unexpected hilarity is found in the races’ commentary: While you can give your horses custom names, there is a huge variety of “commentary friendly” name suggestions. I’ve giggled out loud on more than one occasion when my horses “Raw Egg” and “Moon Moon” were called out in their position on the track. Even randomized opponents’ names will elicit the occasional laugh, thanks to bizarre name combinations. 

This sort of amusement is perhaps not what I set out to find in this game, but it has proven time and time again to be a source of great amusement, and a factor that makes me look forward to naming my new horses by clicking the randomize button until I get the dumbest name possible. 

Tag yourself, I’m Pirate Aunt.

I’m not even kidding, this is quality humor.

Breeding, Training, Managing

When you’re not on the racetrack, you have a bunch of things to do at home: You have income to collect, horses to train, foals to feed or facilities to upgrade. Your progress is always limited either by gold, by time or by completing story goals. Those story goals often consist of selling specific horses, upgrading specific parts of your farm, or winning specific races. 

You are guided by these familiar NPCs throughout the story.

Training your horse’s stats is a one-click interaction and the three different attributes share one animation.

Tack is only cosmetic and can be changed at will.

Income generates passively in the background whether you’re playing or not.

The loop of racing - spending - levelling that so ensues is perhaps not particularly deep, but you always know what to do next, and you always have something to do while waiting for a foal to be born or for your next homestead payout to be available. 

These real time waiting mechanics are a common characteristic of free to play games where the waiting can be skipped with in-app purchases. In a 40$ premium title, they stand out as a remnant of the game’s mobile origins. Foaling time increases by Grade, my latest was 10 minutes. Homestead income is generated every 5 minutes. Foals can be fed every 2-3 minutes for stat bonuses.

I personally didn’t find the timing balance egregious enough to be bothered. Your mileage may vary. Apart from the homestead income, all wait times can be skipped with ingame money, which I’ve often found not to be worth the trouble. 

Breeding new foals from your winners is not only incredibly cute, it’s also your best bet to get into position of higher grade horses, because buying them will likely be out of budget. You can pay for studs or select your own stallions to sire your next champions. This joy of this all is somewhat dampened by the fact that stud fees are not available as a source of income, and that breeding a high grade foal costs a lot of money even when coupling two of your own horses. 

Breeding horses is satisfying and cute, but anyone going into Rival Stars expecting an accurate genetics simulation will be disappointed: your foals will inherit markings and track preferences from parents as well as a rough idea of coat color. But strategic combination of colors according to real life biology is not what you should come to this game for. 

This is not something that particularly bothers me personally – horse genetics are an incredibly complex subject that I still know relatively little about – but may be relevant to anyone interested in the breeding in particular.

New studs become available after some real life wait time.

The game offers photo opportunities with poses to choose from.

While your horses’ levels increase through racing, their actual stats are increased with a one-click training interaction that costs significant amounts of money at higher levels, potentially making it more worthwhile to sell a horse completely untrained. It’s possible I simply haven’t found the right balance yet though, between how much I should spend on stud fees, how much to invest in feeding and training before selling a horse. 

User Experience and Controls

Individually changing graphics settings is not often an option in mobile ports.

For the most part, Rival Stars has managed its transition from mobile to desktop well, where the user experience is concerned. It offers a decent number of graphics settings and has none of the glaringly obvious porting errors of something like Horse Riding Tales. 

That being said, there are a number of nitpicks that could have been handled better: Betting amounts should be settable with typing numbers rather than clicking (and give me an option to “bet max” while taking the starting fee and my available gold into account while we’re at it!), I want to be able to leave the training screen using the escape key instead of having to click the ‘done’ button, shortcuts to get to racing, homestead, stables and training would be nice, and the available shortcuts for Market and Goals should be displayed all the time, not just sometimes/at random. 

As the team has promised to keep updating the game, I hope such small improvements can still be expected as patches in the near future.

Outlook

At the time of writing, I am by no means “done” with the game. I’ve played about 9 hours so far and definitely want to see more of it. While the narrative is not a focal point, I am interested in the continued development of the titular “Rival” I’ve been introduced to, and what my stable manager has experienced to keep her so cautious about bringing her daughter to the stables. 

Considering that horses can apparently go up to Grade 10 and Level 50, I am probably about halfway to completion since I’ve just bred my first Grade 5 horse. 

Apart from the story mode, the game also offers online multiplayer racing and betting with your friends, which I’ve quickly tried but found pretty uninteresting to me as a player, to the surprise of no one who reads this blog regularly. 

A nice add-on is the Creation Hub, a sort of character creator where you can create your own horse. Manually created  horses can be made available for purchase in story mode, but cannot be used for breeding.* This is a neat little toy that I don’t see myself using much but it’s nice to have.

*Update: Apparently, this has been changed: custom created horses can be used for breeding once you’ve reached Prestige Level 20.

Multiplayer races give max level horses to everyone apparently.

The horse creator is a nice addition, but suffers a bit from the mobile-optimized UI.

Conclusion

I’ve seen multiple people wonder and discuss if a port of a free-to-play mobile game could possibly be worth its price tag on Steam. Even as someone who always gladly spends money on games and wants to support developers, I’ll admit that 40$ feels like it’s a bit on the steep side, all things considered. 

Whether or not it’s worth the money to you you will depend on your preferences and your budget. Personally, I much prefer a pretty horse game on my big screen, and a premium experience over constant in-app purchases and therefore consider the desktop edition the way to go. 

And as a game aimed at adults which takes its audience seriously, Rival Stars will be a far better investment of time and money than indirect competitors like Bibi & Tina and My Riding Stables. Horse focused games with solid amounts of single player content, a high degree of polish and quality horse models and animations are so incredibly rare that Rival Stars absolutely stands out as one of the top experiences in desktop horse gaming. 

Although the bar for “good horse game on PC” is still fairly low, Rival Stars Horse Racing has just earned its place among the best that’s available.

Rival Stars Horse Racing: Desktop Edition is available on Steam. The Mane Quest has been provided with a free copy for review purposes.