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Rival Stars Horse Racing Desktop: Many Races to Run

Posted on September 17, 2024 by Aywren

I first wrote about Rival Stars when I picked the game up on Steam a few years back. While I’ve poked my head in the game on and off since then, I haven’t had the itch to sit down and put hours into it until last week.

The game has added a LOT of new features since I last played including a Legacy line for your horse breeding, many coat color variations, steeplechase, and new breeds. With the new breeds came the ability to crossbreed and earn new stat bonuses. Very exciting stuff!

So, when I was bit by the bug to want to check in on where I left off, I had a lot of new things that I’ve never tried before. I’d previously made it all the way to prestige 12 and was breeding grade 6 horses, though not with great stats.

I’d forgotten a lot of the breeding mechanics – such as when you breed up to the next rank, you can expect to have a sub-par horse stat-wise at first. Therefore, I ended up wasting way too much money and time trying to breed an impossible horse last week (I could kick myself).

Once I focused on knocking out the prestige leveling objectives, I was able to make some progress. Including beating my rival several times as the story unfolded across the levels.

While the story is bare bones, woven between marking off goals and winning races, I’ve liked it overall. It’s had an interesting turn in the later levels making your rival a much more likeable individual. Maybe we’ll end up rivaling for fun rather than anger?

The one thing I have to say about this game, though, is it does get fairly grindy the further up you get. This is probably due to being a port of a mobile game, but every time I saw an object such as this, I groaned:

Seeing that the longest possible race in the game is 3,200m, this means you have to run 79 races to meet this objective. Maybe more if you don’t find the longest possible races each time. That’s… a LOT of racing. I mean… a LOT.

Previous objectives required something like 50 races to finish, and I admit, I only got through that with YouTube rolling in the background. Granted, I wasn’t running the hardest races (just the longest), and since the game auto-runs your horse, you don’t have to do much if you’re not on a competitive track.

This time around, I need to level up a horse while trying to meet this objective, so that will at least give me something else to work on while I’m running the races. But yes, my one complaint about this game (aside from the cost-prohibitive breeding and no creative mode) is that objectives get fairly grindy.

But once you’re done with it, you’re done with it.

Well… sorta.

The next step, now that I’m at prestige 20, is to breed my first grade 10 horse (which is the highest grade). This is all RNG as there are no grade 10 studs on the market, and two grade 9s only have a 36% chance of breeding a grade 10.

I blew through quite a stack of cash to meet that objective – you can see her at the top of this post – my first grade 10 is Doubtless Company. Not a huge fan of her coat color, but beggars can’t be choosers at this point.

While I was happy with this achievement, and she became my new legacy horse, the sad reality is, like with any other rank up, you start at the bottom with D-rank stats in everything. Because there are no grade 10 studs on the market, you can do one of two things:

• Hope to breed a grade 10 stallion (which will also have low stats), and then try to breed them (inbreeding isn’t a thing in this game) to rank up your skills. This… will take a LOT of time and money.
• OR… Create a horse in the horse creation system, give them the best stats at grade 10, then breed with that horse.

That… felt a little bit like cheating. Truthfully, I could have created my own horses from the horse creation system anytime I wanted all this time. However, it’s only at prestige 20 that you’re allowed to breed horses with one you’ve created.

So. Seeing these are my two options…

I have created a stallion.

HOWEVER. As you can see, there’s a price to be paid for this horse – even at level 1, I will have to pay close to 9 million gold for him!

And guess what I don’t have thanks to previous breeding sucking my coffers dry?

Yep. Gold.

This means that it’s back to racing and leveling the one horse I need to level (in order to make a sell objective), to eventually earn the money needed to afford this stud.

And that’s just the first step of starting to breed my grade 10 horses. Because that’s going to be an expensive road to walk as well! Yes, I could just make the horse and be done with it, but I want to breed my legacy line from this horse.

Nothing good comes cheap in Rival Stars! I can’t imagine what the mobile version is like. I was tempted to try it, but thinking about how much time I put into this version, being gated by mobile game mechanics would certainly be frustrating.

Despite that, I really do want to finish up the story mode. Then I might start an Arabian-only challenge. That could be fun!

Oh, and I haven’t even touched the steeplechase or cross-country races. So, there’s a whole another side of this game for me to explore. Hopefully with a horse well-trained to jump!

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