Tour de France 2024 review

Cyanide’s latest entry continues to nail the simulation of energy management and finally adds real-time, online races. But largely, the franchise’s lingering blemishes are difficult to ignore.

Sports titles routinely permit players to perform unparalleled feats of athleticism. From throwing a game-winning pass with pinpoint precision in Madden to hitting a fastball deep into the centerfield seats in MLB: The Show, the genre can feel like an interactive highlight reel. But largely, games struggle to convey the strenuousness of sports. And that’s what makes Cyanide Studio different. Since 2009, the developer has been simulating the physicality of the Tour de France.

Each annual iteration has endeavored to recreate the 21 stages and 2,081 miles of La Grande Boucle. While controlling your rider during a real-time simulation of a 200-kilometer stage can test your fortitude, the real challenge is managing your virtual athlete’s stamina level. Like previous entries, Tour de France 2024’s cyclists might have extraordinary endurance, but they’re human, after all.  If you haven’t played any of the previous entries, heading into the game’s tutorial is essential. Here, you’ll learn many of the nuances of stamina management.

Team ‘Team’

Pleasingly, steering your digital Cannondale, Trek, or Canyon (sorry, don’t expect licensing; “Team” still seems to be the dominant brand) is rather easy. The steering feels like a car racing title, with TdF 2024 offering a color-colored racing line that alerts you when to brake. You’ll learn about drafting, which is a term when one rider closely follows another, taking advantage of the slipstream. Fortunately, there are visual indicators to show when you’re saving a bit of energy. Learning to take an aero (short for ‘aerodynamic’) position is one of the easier and undoubtedly more important lessons. This and using rejuvenating ‘feeds’ are the fundamental methods for regaining stamina.

After completing the lessons, you should be ready to compete for the yellow jersey in the game’s Race mode. Here, you can take on the Tour, the seven-stage Critérium du Dauphiné, the treacherous hill climbs of the Liège–Bastogne–Liège or tackle the cobblestones of the Paris–Roubaix day race. Optionally, you can select your own succession of stages, tweaking a multitude of settings before the tours.

If you’d rather jump into management, there’s a Pro Team mode, where you’ll be given a restrained budget and use that to build a two-wheeled legacy. It doesn’t get too deep, serving as a sampler for Cyanide’s standalone Pro Cycling Manager 2024. Meanwhile, TDF 2024’s Pro Leader mode offers a light role-playing approach, as you level up a promising rookie toward a career that rivals Greg LeMond’s.

An Hour of Progress Can Be Lost in Seconds

Regardless of mode, energy management is the key to success in Tour de France 2024. Smartly, Cyanide pared things down to an on-screen meter with blue and red gauges. The former reflects the overall stamina of your rider. Obviously, stronger pedaling will proportionately reduce your endurance, and you’ll want to make sure there’s enough gas in your tank for any upcoming elevations. Meanwhile, the meter’s red dial represents your ‘attack energy’, which is consumed any time you sprint to break away from the peloton.

While brief downhill coasts and consuming gel can replenish some of your energy, you won’t want to depend on either of these actions. Success, especially in mountainous stages, entails careful conservation of your power and eliminating as much drag (air resistance) as possible. Otherwise, you’ll face a ‘breakdown’ where your rider will inevitably lose ground. When this happens, your fellow athletes will pass by and color will vanish from the screen, indicating the precariousness of your physical state.

Like a Fish in a School, Advancing in Perfect Unison

Sure, riding in the middle of the peloton can seem daunting at first, but the game struggles with crash modeling, so you won’t have to worry about triggering a pile-up like the actual 2021 Tour de France. However, the limited collision detection breaks the sense of immersion. Veer too far from the road and you’ll encounter invisible walls. For better or worse, TDF 2024 forces you to obey the guidelines of good sportsmanship. If you do turn up the collision setting, the game displays a single lackluster animation for the event.

That’s hardly the only disappointment. There’s some audio commentary, but it’s repetitious and lacking any of the insights offered by real-life announcers. While the game’s soundtrack occasionally crescendos into a groove, just as often it sounds like license-free, sports-sim filler. Visually, TdF 2024 makes little attempt to recreate the likeness of actual athletes, so expect to witness a herd of clones. On the upside, the game’s jerseys occasionally reveal actual branding and help to capture the patchwork of colors that make up a rushing peloton.

Finally, Real-Time, Online Races

This season, Tour de France 24 augments its asynchronous rivalries with a new Criterium mode, allowing for up to six players to compete in a real-time race that can range from thirty to fifty kilometers. However, at present, the experience is undermined by lengthy matchmaking delays and minor bugs. Still, it’s a step in the proper direction for the franchise, as these types of competitions can make a road cycling simulation stirring.

But even if you’re a staunch individualist, TDF 2024 injects some teamwork into its races. Although there is limited communication with your colleagues, switching control with one of your teammates introduces an interesting wrinkle into stages. Alternatively, you can have the CPU seize control of your rider, with the game’s AI doing a serviceable job at competing. Seemingly, the game’s aptitude has been given a tune-up, which helps when you relinquish the handlebars as well as makes CPU-controlled opponents behave a bit more realistically.

Conclusion

Like a competitor inching up notorious Col de la Loze, Cyanide’s Tour de France franchise is demonstrating serious fatigue. Beyond bringing actual cyclists to Pro Team mode and the inclusion of a real-time competitive mode, largely this year’s outing isn’t all that different from the 2023 iteration. If you’re truly yearning for some simulated road cycling, Tour de France 2024 does an adequate job at reproducing the complexities of stamina management. But beyond that, this is a series that’s taken too many rest days.

Tour de France 2024 was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.