MXGP – Review
Motocross always looks awesome on TV, it’s one of those motor sports that just does. Riding high-powered motorcycles over a dirt terrain designed to give riders plenty of airtime sure sounds promising. MXGP carries the official license of the official MX1 and MX2 championships and features all its tracks, teams and riders and offers you a chance at becoming the MXGP champion!
Story
In a game like this you wouldn’t expect a real story and there isn’t one either. In career mode you start of as a wild card rider and make your way up from there. You get to pick your team and also a personal manager which offers some sense of guidance. Apart from that the game moves forward in a pretty linear fashion. You work your way through the seasons while progressing through the different GP’s.
Graphics
MXGP is not a graphical marvel and it does not aim to be. The most important things, as you would imagine, are the bikes, riders and the tracks thermselves and they are okay. The physics of your character feel realistic enough and the same goes for the motorbikes. The part of the track on which you actually ride feels good to ride on and looks quite alright. Riding through the dirt, you leave your mark and throwing yourself in a corner actually has an effect on the way the marks are formed. Terraforming is a term that jumps to mind. While in its essence it means shaping the earth, in MXGP you partly shape the track. One major graphical problem though is the rest of the track, it seems to be completely static. While ambient objects all lack detail, they’re also unmovable and don’t react to your actions. For example: crashing into a commercial sign right besides the track, will evidently throw you off your bike but will not cause the board to show any markings. As a result the surroundings don’t feel alive at all. Sure, the stands are all filled with MXGP fans but I advise you to not pay any attention to them because they look more like cardboard figures than anything else.
Sound
The game is accompanied by a rocking soundtrack. Don’t expect anything major on that front but it does fit with the whole atmosphere. The bikes sound nice and satisfying and riding past a supporter stand will result in you hearing their cheers. A nice little touch which does add to the experience.
Gameplay
Besides the career mode, other game modes include instant race, GP, championship and a multiplayer mode. The first three offer all the things you’d expect. You get to pick between an custom created rider or one off the existing ones and then ride one or more races, depending on your selection. We’ll talk about multiplayer later. The mode you’ll be spending most time in, will probably be the career mode. You’ll first get a couple of tutorial videos which do explain the basics but felt very limited and you’ll have to learn most things through trial and error. I felt like the game developer could have done quite a bit more there. Basically you start as a wild card rider, meaning you’re not really teamed up yet and get a contract to ride a couple of races. After those, you get to pick a racing team and your first real season sets off. You start in MX2 and get to go to the MX1 series if you’ve done well enough in the rankings. The main difference between those two categories is the amount of power the bikes have, MX2 is up to 250cc while MX1 is up to 450cc.
Riding controls feel good and are obvious enough. You get to pick a level of physics ranging from base to realistic. Changing those will require you to control the balance of your rider in addition to controlling your motorbike. Besides that, you can tweak some other things as well including AI difficulty and race options. A normal GP consists of practice laps, qualification and two normal races. You can choose to only play the races and then can also choose how many laps each race will be with a minimum of three up to twenty. Each race awards an amount of points based on your finishing position and the rider with the most points at the end of the second race, wins. A season or championship consists of 14 GP’s. Multiplayer doesn’t really add a lot to the game however. It consists of normal races or a whole season if you’re up to that however in my attempts I wasn’t able to connect to their servers.
Conclusion
MXGP certainly is a nice throw at bringing motocross to the PS3 but does so with its fair share of flaws. Whilst the game’s atmosphere feels quite authentic and effort has been made to make the whole career mode feel more alive, some elements just take away from that experience. Those elements include a lack of detail on ambient objects, a lack of variation in the gameplay and a non-existing tutorial. For the fans of the genre however, MXGP is a must.
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