I wish I had stronger feelings about MXGP. If a game is great, it’s easy to wax lyrical about its beautiful mechanics. If a game is abysmal, it’s fun to tear down everything awful about it. If a game walks the fine line between mediocre and merely good, there’s less fun to be had covering it.

But that’s what MXGP is. A decent motocross game, maybe even a half-good simulation of the sport. For the people who already have an interest in professional motocross, this game is a no-brainer. In the larger context of games, it’s not likely to make much of a splash, because it doesn’t deliver its gameplay, which is solid, with an ounce of flair or attitude.

First off, the physics are tight and rewarding; simple enough for a newcomer but with enough complexity to benefit dedicated players. There’s a steering system and a leaning system, which allows you to shift your rider’s weight with the right analog stick. A few very brief tutorial videos teach you the basics – lean forward to gain traction around turns, lean backwards to pop wheelies and gain air on the jumps – but the physics won’t start to make sense until you spend some time with the game.

When the physics make sense, and the the differences between hard packed ground and mud become clearer, and you understand the costs and benefits of drifting vs. a clean turn, the game really clicks. Approaching a bend in top gear and swinging out your back tire with the front brake, accelerating in short bursts to regain traction is always a little rush of adrenaline. The bike physics have a lot of little complexities, and when you fully understand those complexities and are making split second decisions about how to operate your bike, that’s when the game is at its best.

It’s just that, after a while, all those split second decisions become second nature, and after a point, the game isn’t beautifully complex anymore. I’d like to say that every track offers up a new way to approach your driving, but that’s not entirely true. A few laps around each of them and you’ve basically figured out the approach. This is not to say the tracks are bad, as they are modeled after real tracks from the real MXGP, and are all quite good.

Maggiora in Italy is my personal favourite, which has a particular blind turn hidden behind a sharp bank, forcing you to manage your speed carefully so as not to jump too high and go flying into the spectators. Hyvinkää in Finland has plenty of long, straight sections with plenty of opportunities for high speeds, but the bumpy terrain makes those high speeds risky, especially in the turns, where drifting can cause one of your tires to get caught in a rut, sending you flying.

Speaking of sending you flying, let’s talk about the AI in this game, because it’s not great. The AI racers can drive a mean racing line, especially on the higher difficulties, but what they cannot seem to do is care in the slightest about their own safety, let alone the safety of others. They seem entirely oblivious to your presence, to the point where they simply run straight into you in a turn. I can’t count the number of times where I was racing a perfectly good line, only to have someone plow into me and make me wipe out. I get it, Motocross is a very dangerous sport, but that’s exactly why racers need to be wary of getting too close to other riders. The dance of distance that happens in a real life overtake happens for this very reason. You want to get close enough that you’re applying pressure but not so close that you crash and possibly kill someone. These guys? They just pretend you don’t exist and charge straight ahead.

The main issue here is that while the physics feel great, the audiovisuals don’t support the feeling of rough, bumpy terrain as well as the physics. There is some terrain deformation, which is nice, and altogether too rare in off-road racing games, but the engine renders the deformations rather poorly. It’s nice that the physics let you feel the impact of driving over someone’s rut in the ground, but it’s a shame that you may not even notice the deformations until you’re about to hit them. Ground textures are muddy, but not in a good way. Distant trees that surround many tracks are flat textures, blurry and unconvincing. Your bike’s audio frequently cuts out when too many bikes are onscreen, and just for the record, I had at least five hangups/crashes in the middle of the career races.

The game also has a bad habit of showing cutscenes of what I suppose is your coach clapping you in the shoulder, encouraging and congratulating you before and after races. I assume this is done to imitate bigger-budget sports games, but here the character models simply aren’t up to snuff. There is zero facial animation, so while your trainer’s gesticulations clearly indicate he is speaking to you, his face remains static and emotionless.

I have to stress this: the physics are really good. Unfortunately, physics are just one part of game feel, and there’s just not enough feedback for how the bike is going to react. Motocross is a filthy sport, but MXGP is a fairly clean game. The spray of dirt behind your back tire is pitiful, and the noise of traction loss is a static, repetitive noise that becomes an irritance rather than an enjoyable piece of game feedback. There are a number of ways that MXGP could have played up the dust-cloud chaos of motocross, but the most dust we get to see is in the pre-race FMVs that feature each track.

I hate to nitpick, because MXGP is a solid motocross game, and its racing can be thrilling when you get the braindead AI opponents out of your hair. But when a game calls itself the capital-letters Official Motocross Game and doesn’t muster the polish to have some decent bits of mud flung into the air, that’s a bit of a disappointment.

Gameplay

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