Horse Bonding, New Breeds and More Disciplines: Rival Stars Horse Racing teases Content Updates
Rival Stars Horse Racing is a PC and mobile game created and maintained by New Zealand based dev studio PikPok. I reviewed its Desktop Edition when it was initially released in 2020, talked about some of its later additions in 2021, and interviewed its Art Lead later that same year.
Although I don’t play it on a particularly regular basis, I do follow its development with interest and occasionally try new features: Within the past year, the Desktop Edition of Rival Stars has added Cross Country competitions, extensive Photo Mode updates, new Story missions and a variety of minor Quality-of-Life updates. The team also conducts player feedback surveys on occasion, obviously making conscious efforts to find a direction of improvements that matter to its audience.
To celebrate the game’s four year anniversary – that’s counting from the mobile version’s release, in case you’re noticing that the years don’t add up – PikPok released a teaser for upcoming features.
The teaser promises more horse interactions and bonding, more space in pastures and stables, a new competitive discipline with Steeplechase riding, and even entirely new horse breeds. The scope of these features is significant – Rival Stars started out as a very self-contained racing game with very limited interactions and a single horse model.
That the game can grow in such ways speaks to its ongoing financial and critical success, and to the concrete interests of its horse-loving audience.
I reached out to PikPok in hopes of getting a bit more concrete information on any of the teased features. The studio remains tight-lipped on details for the time being, but Community Manager Bailey Raumati was able to forward me some insight into the team’s intentions:
“The addition of more domestic features such as bonding and space in stables/pastures was motivated by our desire to create a deeper and more well-rounded experience for our players,” they tell me. “We saw an opportunity to improve the game and offer more ways for players to connect with their horses.”
Seeing horses roll in their pasture remains an incredibly rare thing to see in media representations and I love RSHR for it.
The recently expanded photo mode gives players lots of options to take impressive screenshots like this one.
Bailey was also able to confirm that the new horse breeds will be visually distinct from the existing thoroughbreds and come with breed-specific strengths that will impact the gameplay. As for which breeds the game will tackle, we’ll have to wait and see. “We know our players are very keen to know what the new breeds will be,” the team says. “While we're not ready to reveal those details just yet, keep an eye out on our social channels for teasers and updates throughout the year!”
The PikPok team further confirmed that the promised updates will be coming to both the mobile and desktop versions of the game, but that there may – as has been the case in the past – be differences in the specific implementation and timing of release on each platform.
I’m curious to see how the game will tackle these new additions, and I will definitely keep a close eye on Rival Stars’ update schedule.
Rival Stars Horse Racing is available on Steam, Google Play and the App Store.
Rival Stars Horse Racing is something of a rarity in our niche: it’s a polished game aimed at adult players, that’s generally well received and getting regular content updates. For the game’s five year anniversary, I sat down for a call with PikPok CEO Mario Wynands in order to talk about the game’s history, its position in the horse game market and why it takes different approaches to different platforms.