Old Thread. Saw someone else resurrected it last month and thought I’d give a brief honest review.
After not being selected for ZWIFT beta testing (yet… fingers crossed) I decided to see what training software was out there. I used trainer road last winter with a power meter and sufferfest some of the time. It was better than doing base and intervals on my own with a stopwatch. But I wanted to try something that was more involved. I stumbled across tour de giro, since the first 2 weeks were free I downloaded it.
Setup was easy. It recognized my ANT+ devices immediately. I found the initial screens very dated and not difficult, but not intuitive to navigate. I only had a small window to ride and opted to do a solo ride to figure things out. I began by setting my rider stats (basically weight) and desired A.I. player FTPs. I think this feature is crucial. As the winter goes on I really like the idea of increasing A.I. FTPs by a watt or 2 a week, thus making the season get more difficult just slightly thus hopefully raising my FTP. Next I picked my map (tour of battenkill ) from a very large list of maps. It let me select just a segment of the course I wanted to ride, which was a nice feature! I started at the beginning and selected 20 miles. I hit start and the countdown to the start began.
The “game” lets you select different viewing angles which was great. As the gun went off the AI players headed down the road and I began pedaling keeping myself towards the front of the peloton. The things I noticed right away were my wattage being displayed along with current speed and cadence. All of which I assumed would be displayed ahead of time. The surprise was the Drafting Meter which gave you a real time graph and value of wattage saved depending on where in the pack you were. While you obviously can’t control where exactly your little rider guy will choose to place himself if was pretty easy to draft when necessary and then crush a sprint or attack a KOM.
The game was great about showing where KOMs and Sprints are on the course. It displays KOMs and sprints on the top of the screen on the elevation chart. It also gives you a countdown as you get close to an approaching KOM.
The graphics are where things start to break down a bit for me. There isn’t really much sense of reality graphically speaking. It’s a bit like sega genesis in terms of that. I am certainly not going “wow.” That being said the graphics aren’t so poor that its annoying or distracting. The roads did go through my body at some points and the riders looked as if they were going into the mountainside.
The A.I. riders did a good job of maintaining a certain avg. power output. I wouldn’t call it a sustained wattage as it did seem to vary up and down, but I wouldn’t call it “smart” either. At least in this brief test I was not challenged by any A.I. rider on a sprint or KOM. It would be nice to see some A.I. riders that were sprinters and some that are climbers so that at least a few give you a hard psh if you really want to score those bonus points. Perhaps if I had set the A.I. FTP 10-20 watts higher than my own I would have had greater challenges in that regard.
Finally, after completion of a ride TdG lets you view your effort on their webpage. The Data seems to be a little thin compared to that of Trainer Road, which is what I am used to. I also do not see a way to upload a .gpx file to strava or any other tracking software you may use.
In summary, The software is easy to set up. Free to try. Fun to use. It could however use better graphics, post ride data, and a way to upload said data.
I will try and remember to update this info as I try a few multiplayer ride over the course of the next 2 weeks.
For $10 a month I am left wanting just a bit more, not much more, just a little. The big thing the game has going for it is it adds a compete factor into indoor training and therefor I will probably try it for a couple months after my free trial runs out to see if and when I get tired of it and move on or if it grows on me and I end up getting addicted.
Thanks to the developers for creating this game. I DO see it as a great training tool and it DID make me want to ride harder due to the compete factor (and that was just against A.I.)… I would imagine racing real people, especially people I know would make that factor much stronger. I hope you continue to update this software and get the word out that it exists.