Review: My Riding Stables 2 - A New Adventure — Cool New Features Dragged Down by Old Baggage

Publisher Markt + Technik and developer Independent Arts Software have brought another horse farm buildup game to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. I first found out about the game last October when it was announced, and then had a very enlightening conversation with the Publisher in November. You’ll learn more on that and the development of these games in an upcoming article – today we’re talking about the game itself, and its merits. 

Don’t let the number 2 in its name fool you: My Riding Stables 2, released in December 2020, is the third My Riding Stables game I review on The Mane Quest (links below) and the fourth game that bears the My Riding Stables title since 2005. 

I will use the following abbreviations with release years to refer to the previous games: 

• MRS 05 My Riding Stables: Your Horse World

• MRS 08 My Riding Stables: Life With Horses, also sold as Gallop & Ride

• MRS 18 My Riding Stables: Life With Horses, sold as My Riding Stables: Your Horse Breeding on Steam

• MRS 20 or MRS2 My Riding Stables 2: A New Adventure, see international titles in the announcement article

Calling these games a series of sequels is misleading however, because after the original My Riding Stables: Your Horse World of 2005, only My Riding Stables: Life With Horses 2008 was really a new game, whereas My Riding Stables 2018 and My Riding Stables 2020 are essentially remakes… with some new features, admittedly. I know, it’s a mess. This is why we need that Database. Anyway, let’s get right into it. 

Here we go again

For the third time after the 2008 and 2018 games, My Riding Stables 2 uses the the exact same quests and tasks. And I don’t mean that it simply uses the familiar “you come into possession of a horse farm” trope, but that quest goals have once again been copied almost exactly.

As a result, your first interactions in the game are very close to what they’ve always been in games of this series: you retrieve your horse from the paddock, groom it and clean its hooves to gain its trust. Eventually you unlock riding hall, therapy center and breeding stable to access the foal training, horse massage and horse breeding mechanics respectively. 

The most notable change and this game’s core redeeming feature becomes apparent as soon as you’ve saddled your horse for the first time though: instead of having to tediously lead your horse to the farm gate – and in the case of MRS18, only being able to ride on fixed paths once you do – MRS2 lets you mount your horse anywhere on your farm and lets you freely explore the open world around it. It is genuinely a much needed update and something that vastly improves the entire experience. 

The camera can be rotated while on foot, but centers onto the player’s back once mounted.

Treasure chest at the beach.

Said open world consists of hills, forest, a mountain pass and a beach. I spent my first in-game day out exploring and collecting cash from multiple treasure chests, only for the “End of Day” notification to catch me out of the blue and unceremoniously cut my exploration short. After a bit of playing and reading loading screen tips, you learn that the day is over at 5pm, but there is no change in lighting or any other indication that the day’s ending is near. 

Unfortunately, as early as my second or third day of riding around, I was already unable to find any new chests, and soon was not sure if any further race tracks were anywhere to be found. The environment looks decent enough, but with it being completely static you have no reason to revisit a place after seeing it once.  

Still: I know the kind of budget these games work with, and having any open world, even a slightly underwhelming one, in a game of this scope is worth acknowledgement. And for once, there is no awkward separation between “world” and “progress” as we’ve seen in past games such as Ostwind/Windstorm or Bibi & Tina.

A Myriad of Little Fixes

One could read my review of My Riding Stables 2018 while playing this new game and point out a dozen little improvements which I (and other people, admittedly) specifically called out: The horse care minigames (hoofcare and coat grooming) are significantly less annoying and time consuming, with dirt now actually visibly coming off the hoof when you remove it with your pick. Most of the erroneous coat color labels have been corrected. There’s still a light grey horse labelled White and a dark chestnut horse labelled Bay, and leopard spots are labelled as dapples, but the errors are a lot less egregious. 

The different horse breeds now actually have different models, with the Hanoverian looking significantly taller and sleeker than the wavy-maned Andalusian. The Friesian is locked to the color Black as is appropriate, and the breeds’ real life characteristics in terms of their body types have obviously been taken into account, with details such as feathering on the Friesian’s fetlocks.

Saddling and mounting interactions actually have their own animations now, instead of being skipped by fading to black. Many of the awkward word choices have been fixed, though some unfortunate examples like a prompt to “unmount” (instead of dismount) remain. 

The foal training minigame now features an actual foal instead of a slightly smaller horse, and although its canter animation looks a bit silly, the game sure gets the weird everything-is-legs proportions of very young horses right.  

On the one hand, it’s great that feedback on all these things was taken into account. On the other hand many of these mistakes were so basic from either a user experience perspective or a horse lover’s perspective that fixing them is really only the beginning on the path to a good game. 

I really don’t get why they keep remaking these same two minigames.

The sound effect for this is hilarious btw, it sounds like you’re warping the pain away.

Riding and Races

The Riding functionality has been completely overhauled from the 2018 game, much to its benefit: You move freely through the world, and even the races don’t lock you onto a path but let you follow a series of checkpoints. By tapping X repeatedly you speed fluidly from canter to gallop, and if you don’t interact you eventually fall back to a trot. As your tapping is limited by a Stamina bar, riding becomes a balance between spamming X and not emptying the bar. 

Half of these stats remain a mystery to me.

This is alright as a mechanic in theory, but I was surprised by how fidgety the speed management feels when you actually try to optimize it. I failed my first practice race three times, and I don’t think I was being particularly idiotic about it. I eventually figured out that a steady rhythm isn’t the way to go, but that you actually have to spam the button to max speed and then make use of the fact that your bar recharges faster than your speed falls back down. That new races require a few training runs until you get the hang of them is perfectly fine, but I do have my doubts about whether or not the average 8 year old – and remember, that is the actual target audience we’re talking about here – will figure this out before getting frustrated. 

Apart from the Stamina stat, which you can improve with quality fodder, horses also have Strength, Repletion and Skill values, but I could not for the life of me figure out what kind of impact those have or how one can influence them. 

My main gripe with the riding is that the game locks the camera angle behind you. I know from my exchanges with the publisher that the idea behind this camera lock is to make the controls and handling simpler for kids, but I found it horribly frustrating. And as mentioned above, I find it questionable that this stamina system was approved as kid-friendly, but being able to look at your horse from the side was not. As a result, I can hardly tell you anything about the animation quality in the game: what I can see looks fine, but there is simply no way to actually see my horse trot, canter or gallop from any angle other than behind. 

The locked camera keeps you from planning ahead, so you need to practice to learn the twists and turns of the race paths.

Jumping hurdles increases your speed, which can make it tough to get around tight turns, but you can also use it to your advantage in managing stamina.

One change that’s more than welcome is that jumping now happens automatically when you approach an obstacle in a straight line. That is how the original MRS 08 game did it and it remains my preferred approach to jump controls, because it’s a lot more realistic than any “press X to jump” solution. 

In addition to the unlockable race tracks that you start through a notice board on the farm, you can also find race starting points out in the world, and by completing one you make the next one appear. The races follow the same basic formula of “go from checkpoint to checkpoint”, but the orienteering, slalom and hurdles race types do add some variety in terms of where the challenge and focus lies. This is a welcome addition and a neat change of pace, at least as long as you keep finding the new starting points. 

Progress and Second Impressions

As in the previous games, your progress is gated primarily by your tasks, and secondarily by your credits (money). With the addition of the treasure chests, money is a lot easier to come by early on, which lets you unlock the therapy center right away, thereby rendering the less lucrative foal training minigame fairly useless right away. This isn’t horrible, but it’s also just not a great balance.

Your progress in the tasks is another matter: like in the 2018 game, your progress is tied to competitions, and competitions only happen once a week. There is simply not enough to do in the game to justify playing 6 entire days between making actually advancing. This would easily be fixed by allowing competitions to take place on a second day in the middle of the week – as I believe the original 2008 game did. I suspect this is the kind of mistake that gets through because the developers and publishers never genuinely playtest these games for fun and balance. It is simply assumed that whoever ends up playing the game will probably find their fun in it. 

Yes it’s better now, but you really need to freaking love that hoofpicking minigame to genuinely want four horses with gold horseshoe rating.

That the quest tasks are being reused since 2008 is not only lazy – I generally avoid that word to describe other game developers’ work, but yeah I went there – it is also actively to the detriment of the new features. There are no tasks to encourage exploration, for example, no tracking for how many chests or race starting points you’ve already found and how many there still are. Instead we get the same old tedious “gold horseshoe rating for grooming all of your horses” crap that was already boring in 2008 and definitely feels out of place in this game that has otherwise made some significant progress in terms of reducing tedium. 

Horse Breeding is improved by there being actual foals this time around, but as in the previous games owning multiple horses remains fairly pointless unless you care about the color and shape variety. As far as I can tell, there is no improvement in stats over generations, but I may well have missed something here in terms of what the individual values actually mean. In any case, horse stats are intransparent and unintuitive.

The horse breeding happens in this menu and works just as in the previous games.

The “Ride across the Plain” race takes place exclusively in the mountain pass by the way.

In order to advance faster, I quickly fell back into the habit of riding a competition, then skipping multiple days in a row, then training for the next race once on the day before. Thanks to the paddock keeping your horse mostly healthy and happy even if you don’t feed or groom it, that is a viable strategy, but it sure doesn’t feel like fun. I got up to unlocking the fifth of ten races, and I don’t see the point of spending another two or three hours grinding through the rest of them, so that’s where I call it quits. 

Mounted Games Multiplayer

A completely new aspect of this game that the series has not had before is a Multiplayer Tournament mode. In the Tournament, one to four players take turns participating in four mounted games, including a race where you have to run one way, then ride back the other, and one game where you have to pick up flags and place them elsewhere. 

The mechanics of these games are perfectly fine by themselves – I’d even go as far as calling them “fun” – but they are once again an example of a feature that has no reason to be hidden away in an entirely different mode. Why not let the player compete in these minigames in the single player campaign and reward them for it through tasks and credits? 

The Tournament mode is further diminished by the fact that when multiple controllers are connected, all their input is weighted equally, meaning that if you really do play with two people, the other player can just mess with your horse. I presume this is so that kids with only one controller can still take turns playing, but giving children the option to completely ruin their opponents’ experience that way still seems careless. 

The mechanics are fine, but the controls are fidgety.

Pour one out for my poor boyfriend who I forced to play this with me.

Overall Playability

So what does all that mean for the overall playability and value of My Riding Stables 2: A New Adventure? Compared to the series’ last entry in 2018, this is without doubt an improvement in every way. But the bar that this series set last time was so devastatingly low, that I’m not sure how much praise this one deserves for leaping far above it. 

Unrelated to this paragraph but I just wanted to add somewhere that no, this is not in fact a Western saddle.

I’ve encountered very few bugs in my playtime, and despite some caveats about the stamina system and camera lock, the controls are a lot less fidgety than in the last game of this series. The loading screens, such as when you enter and exit buildings like the therapy center, are still oddly long, but at least you now get tips and hints displayed on them. They also finally replaced the old soundtrack, thankfully. 

If you or your children absolutely want a stable management game on consoles, MRS2 is likely your best choice.

Does that mean MRS2 is a better game than the original 2008 one? Eh, I don’t know. I wasn’t a big fan of that one either when I played it for my review. If you’re a fan of the original My Riding Stables 08, I suspect you’ll be happier just replaying the old one, considering the nostalgia factor. 

The fact that tasks, minigames and structure are copied completely means this game doesn’t add a lot of value for anyone who’s played a game in this series before, even if the world and race tracks are new. 

The choice to add a “2” to this one’s name is baffling, since it’s a remake rather than a sequel in terms of goals and quests, and I doubt that anyone who played the 2018 game really went “Yes, I want more of this.” Interestingly, the original German title forgoes the number. Whoever made that decision for the international release likely doesn’t know enough about the game’s actual content beyond “another horse game”. 

Conclusion

After the awful 2018 My Riding Stables and the inoffensive but boring 2019 Bibi & Tina, Markt + Technik and Independent Arts Software have come up with a game that I can call deeply flawed, but with some redeeming qualities. At this rate, they might arrive at something “pretty good” if we give them another few years. Personally I’d recommend they save up that money to create something with a longer shelf life, but between me not knowing every detail of their business model and them being very set in their established process, I won’t hold my breath for that. 

In conclusion, this game has many nice features and important improvements. Unfortunately, they all come with major caveats: the new horse models are pretty, but you barely see anything of them thanks to the weird camera handling. The new riding system feels pretty neat, but it becomes a chore due to the limited competition schedule. The new treasure chests and in-world races are cool, but you have no way of tracking your progress due to the outdated quest list.

What is new – new race types, treasure chests etc – is directly and irrevocably harmed by what’s still the same: the outdated quests setup and bad progression and balance. This game is a vast improvement over the last one. But the series still has a long way to go before I can genuinely recommend it. And honestly: it is really, really time to stop remaking the 2008 game and instead use the improved riding, world and horse care systems to make an actually new game.

My Riding Stables 2: A New Adventure is available on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. The Mane Quest was provided with a free review copy of the PS4 version.