While motorsports fans are still enjoying WRC 4 and MotoGP 13, Italian racing game specialists Milestone are already rolling out their next hit. This time it’s a game for motocross fans, featuring dynamic surfaces and some really long jumps. This test review will let you know just how much fun the ultimately is.
Motocross Modes
For motocross fans, the game sounds like something off their Christmas wish list – MX GP is officially licensed by the MX1 and MX2 FIM Motocross World Championship classes, which is enough to have fans revving their engines before the game even starts. Fast-paced video clips and vivid loading screen images underscore the first impression that we’re looking at a really sophisticated game here, fuelling high expectations for the quality of the adaptation. And with 14 well-known courses from the 2013/2014 season, located all over Europe, as well as 60 official riders, this game is seriously going to have a lot of fans’ hearts thumping. Easy-to-use custom options allow you to create your own rider, as well.
All game modes are listed in the main menu. If you just want to play a quick race or get a taste for the game, Instant Race or Time Attack are your best options. Things get more interesting in Grand Prix mode, where training includes a qualifying round that will get you a nice starting position for the two upcoming races. The training and qualifying round takes 30 minutes, but can be cut short at any time. I should mention here that contrary to other racing games, the positions of riders at the starting line are not staggered, but placed next to one another in a straight line. This means that the rider in the pole position has a choice of any of these 16 spots. In Championship mode, you can play a regular season with 14 races. You can edit the locations before the first race begins by removing certain tracks, switching them out with one another, or changing the order they occur in. You don’t necessarily have to compete in 14 races, either. One session can be made up or single or double races, qualifying rounds, or a full weekend.
The centerpiece of the “official motocross video game”, however, turns out to be Career Mode. As an up-and-coming, but unknown wildcard rider you’ll try to score your first team membership in the MX2 series, working your way up to royal-class MX1. Before each race, the team leadership announces how many points they expect you to get. In the first race, this can be a very manageable 15, and if you win you get 25. As the game progresses, each success will have the crew demanding more, and with each good placement things will get more challenging, but you’ll also get more fans. Your headquarters is your home base, and is designed in a very user-friendly manner. The locker opens up a range of customization options, and the computer will provide you with important information on upcoming or past events via email. You can also see what other teams are up to here, and colleagues and competitors will leave their remarks about current races on social feeds. The calendar will take you directly to the action, the score will let you see how individual drivers are doing, and clicking on “MX GP Mag” will show you the cover of the current issue of a motocross magazine. You might even find your own rider mentioned here. It’s a shame though, that there’s not much of an awards ceremony after races to speak of. All you really get is a sort of victory pose.
The online multiplayer function allows up to twelve players to play against each other, either in individual races or seasons. Unfortunately there’s no way for friends to play on a single device with a divided screen. And one curious thing is that it seems a mistake slipped into the stats menu – even though I played many a test round while I was writing this review, it after just a few moments of gameplay it showed that I had logged an impressive 100 hours! The game modes are all really pretty similar, so it might be that only total motocross fans will make much use of them all. Because other than racing, MX GP doesn’t offer any other real challenges – not even a stunt mode. As a consequence, not a few players who started off taking their laps with gusto will find themselves losing motivation after a few hours and looking for the next exit to some real fun.
Yay, a racing game!
Of course, what MX GP does offer is really well done. Everything in the game mechanics bears witness to how good of a racing game it is. Informative tutorial videos hint at an overall gameplay that is easy to learn but difficult to master. In this regard, it’s not just the basic difficulty level you select that’s decisive, but other settings on the bike as well as how much use you make of driving aids. The developers have managed to strike a successful balance between simulator and arcade game – there’s something for everyone here. But even those just switching over to the genre will be able to skip over the two easiest AI levels if they turn on support for the rear wheel brakes, physics, transmission, and rider weight.
The last thing there is nothing other than the shifting of the character’s weight. The L and R buttons cover gas and brakes, though the right analog stick can also be used as a more sophisticated way of controlling these, while the left analog stick steers the bike. Especially at the more challenging and realistic difficulty levels, racing requires a good deal of skill, endurance, concentration, patience, and toughness. You really feel like you’re zipping along in both the third person and first person camera perspectives, and dynamic surfaces on terrain like sand and gravel really add to the experience. This is a feature that is not used as often as it should be, even if it doesn’t have anywhere near the same effect that it does in Motorstorm or Sega Rally, where the vehicles are significantly heavier. After just a few laps the ground is full of deep furrows that make it a good deal more difficult to maneuver.
More options can be found in the Box, where your vehicle has to really be matched to the course. Different courses will require different things of your suspension, transmission, and brakes, and the requirements of each race can be seriously different from the previous one. A small minimap in the left part of the screen shows an overview of the next few meters. You’re sometimes rather arbitrarily forced to restart the race, even if there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it – this happened all too often during the test, even when I hadn’t crashed or left the track. Constant mistakes like these cause the rider some seriously unpleasant upsets. It’s not really necessary, but a cool feature that’s missing in this game is an optional rewind feature like in the racing game GRID.
Not dusty or muddy enough
It’s almost ironic to have to give a game’s graphics a negative rating because there’s not enough dust on the track or enough mud splashing around. MX GP is just such a special case – a motocross game should make you feel dirty just by looking at it, should have players wanting to scrape mud off the TV screen and take a nice hot shower after each race. Unfortunately the graphics as a whole hold back on the particle effects and everything seems pretty clean, despite all the action. Even the bikes and the riders themselves are always relatively unsullied-looking. So it’s no surprise that while there seemed to be a pretty big crowd behind the barriers, they came off sort of pale and stiff. One reason for this could be the numerous clipping errors in the game, which are a huge eyesore, especially when it comes to crashes.
All of a sudden, the ground doesn’t look so dynamic, just ridiculously soft. Puddles and weather effects are also nowhere to be seen, though they could easily make up for one drawback or another. At least the animation is pretty fluid, load times are bearable despite there being so many of them, and clothing flaps visibly in the wind. Along with the very welcome replay function, the finished game ended up including a photo mode as well. You can pause the action at any time and adjust the camera angle or zoom in order to create some really nice screenshots, which can be saved in the XMB menu. There’s really not all that much to say about sound in this game – a bunch of engines roaring around the track at a reasonable volume accompanied by rock music. Unfortunately the game doesn’t allow you to play music from your hard drive while you race.
Official Launch Trailer
cool