Click here to check out our final thoughts.

We do test a lot of pretty high-end bikes here at Flow. We admit it – we’re nasty little gear-whores. But what if you can’t afford a $5000 carbon bike? What if your budget is less than a third of that?

Turns out that you can still get quite a lot of machine for under $1400. The new Polygon Recon 4.0 is a 27.5″-wheeled, 120mm-travel cross country bike with some really impressive features for such a relatively meagre price tag.

Popping the Recon onto the scales was a real surprise, weighing in at just 13.6kg (or around $1 for every 10g of bike). That’s a LOT lighter than we expected.

The frame won’t win any beauty contests, but it looks perfect sound from a practicality, reliability and construction standpoint, and obviously the frame weight isn’t excessive. With Shimano from head to toe we’ve got no issue with the component selection. Sure, the Octalink cranks are a little outdated, but we used this system for many years without worry.

Top marks to Polygon for including the Rockshox Recon TK Gold fork, which is considerably lighter and smoother than the Recon TK Silver fork (which uses steel legs). We’ll put a question mark alongside the Suntour Epicon rear shock for now. Hopefully it can handle the jandle out on the trails.

It sounds strange to say, but we’re actually really looking forward to putting the glitzy bikes aside for a while and testing this bike. We think it’ll be pleasantly refreshing to remind ourselves that you can still have a hell of a lot of fun on a bike that’s doesn’t have a dollar value higher than Craig Thomson’s credit card bill.