Guide
Downhill Domination Arcade and Freestyle Guide: Times, Scores and Tara Llanes
Arcade and Freestyle modes in Downhill Domination explained: 13 Arcade races, score chasing, Drud and Tara Llanes unlocks, and how the score economy really works.
Contents On this page
Careers get the glory, but Arcade and Freestyle are where Downhill Domination keeps its purest tests: the clock and the scoreboard. This guide explains both modes, what they unlock, and how to approach races and runs that leave nowhere to hide.
Arcade mode: the game, distilled
Arcade is single race Downhill Domination with the career scaffolding removed: pick a rider, pick from the 13 Arcade races, and ride for the result and nothing else. It is the mode for learning fields, testing unlocks and settling arguments, and it hides one of the game's best rewards in plain sight. Completing Arcade mode unlocks Tara Llanes, a real pro with real pedigree, which makes Arcade the highest value casual mode on the menu.
Why Arcade races feel different
Without a season around them, Arcade races expose the raw systems. Fields are aggressive from the gate, the courses are the same mountains wearing no narrative, and your result is final when the line is crossed. Players training for Hardcore careers use Arcade as a sparring gym: same opponents, no consequences, instant rematch. A rider who can win Arcade races on demand is ready for anything the careers schedule, because Arcade never lets the standings forgive a bad day. For the complete picture of the game, start from the Downhill Domination fan hub home page and work outwards from there.
Freestyle mode: the score is the opponent
Freestyle removes the other riders' finishing times and replaces them with a number: yours. Runs are judged on trick score, built from variety, Superstyle, links and clean landings. Completing Freestyle mode unlocks Drud, the bonus rider, which fits the mode's personality perfectly. Freestyle is where the game's trick book stops being income and becomes literature, and where riders like Mai and T-bag finally get a mode designed entirely around their gifts.
Building a scoring run
A Freestyle run is architecture. Open on the biggest reliable air with a signature trick, Superstyled if the jump allows it. Link the flat sections with manuals so the meter never sleeps. Rotate tricks, because repetition is taxed. Save the exotic inputs for jumps whose hang time you have measured in practice, not hoped for in the run. And land everything: a crashed trick scores the memory of a trick, which the scoreboard values at exactly zero.
The 60,000 point threshold
Score chasing connects to the wider game through thresholds, most famously the 60,000 points associated with unlocking the Super Jump in the game's reward web. The community's classic route to big totals is patient rather than spectacular: find a hill, work manuals and stoppies for steady points, and let volume do what risk cannot. It is the same lesson Freestyle teaches at run scale. In this game, accumulation beats exhibition, every single time the maths is checked. Scoring runs need the full trick vocabulary from our tricks and Superstyle guide.
Time Trial and beating Incog
The third pillar of the side modes is Time Trial, where the ghost to beat is the developer's own: the Incog best times. These matter beyond bragging, because beating the Incog time on every level with every rider is a step in the full completion chain towards the Protobike. Developer times are a special kind of opponent: set by people who built the shortcuts, beatable only by riders who found them all. Treat each one as a course exam with the answers hidden in the mountain.
Which mode teaches what
Arcade teaches racing: fields, fighting and finishing. Freestyle teaches the trick book and the economy. Time Trial teaches lines, the pure geometry of each course with nobody to punch for help. A complete player rotates all three, which is why the game's deepest unlock chain demands all three. The modes look like side content next to the careers and are actually the curriculum the careers assume you studied. Every reward these modes feed is collected in our complete unlockables guide.
A side mode training week
Monday: Arcade ladder with your main rider, every race once, notes on the two worst. Wednesday: Freestyle, one course, runs built in sections until the links hold. Friday: Time Trial against the Incog ghosts on your two worst courses from Monday. Repeat for a month and the careers will feel like a victory lap. The mountain has many teachers. The side modes are the strictest, and strict teachers are the ones players thank twenty years later.
Quick Answers
What does completing Arcade mode unlock?
Completing Arcade mode unlocks the pro rider Tara Llanes.
What does Freestyle mode unlock in Downhill Domination?
Completing Freestyle mode unlocks the bonus fictional rider Drud.
What are the Incog best times?
They are the developer set target times in Time Trial, and beating them on every level with every rider forms part of the Protobike completion chain.