27-Apr-2004 It's one of those eternal mysteries like, 'where does belly button fluff come from?' Why are there so many friggin' dirt bike games and who the chuff's buying them?
MX Unleashed, MX Superfly, Freestyle MetalX... they're all blurring together into a muddy pile of mediocre extreme sports titles. So when another motocross game skids onto CVG's doormat we pray that there'll be something memorable, unique or compelling about it. Something to justify the madness.
Activision's new title is developed by the team that brought us Excitebike 64 way back on N64, but sadly experience is no substitute for inventiveness. For the most part MTX: Mototrax is motocross by numbers.
Where's The X-Factor? Every extreme sports game and its dog uses Tony Hawk's 4 as a blueprint for structure, objectives and tricks. MTX is no different: a series of vast unlockable themed areas, in which you pick up challenges by speaking to misfits dotted around. There are extra supercross races and arena-based stunt objectives to complete, but the format feels about as fresh as a year-old kipper in a damp sock.
On the flipside the action is solid and the handling feels like the biking equivalent of NFS Underground - tight and satisfyingly arcadey. Plus it's real quick. Multiplayer races are often neck 'n' neck events. Good for a dip-in-dip-out online spurt, though you're unlikely to stick with it for long because of the repetitive track layouts.
Regardless of the decent handling, there's no escaping one of MTX's most annoying flaws: heaps of the objectives are startlingly samey. Wheelie this far; now wheelie a wee bit further; and so on till death washes over you. It's embarrassing that so little imagination has gone into the challenges, and the further you get into the game the less inspired you feel to continue.
Only the hardcore could plug away at the career mode to unlock all the officially licensed merchandise. For the rest, MTX is just another average biker on the dirty pile of forgettable extreme sportsters.
The on-the-bike action is fast and instinctive, but the unoriginal challenges and uninspired environment layouts will leave your engine running a bit cold.
It gets on our tits. Developer Left Field serves up some reasonably enjoyable challenges and then spoils it by recycling objectives, putting tiny twists on them in order to create new ones. It's the easy option, and we're not going to be taken for a ride. It's like buying a CD that boasts 20 songs, but there are really only five - each version played slightly faster than the one before.
Made it! Congratulations, you made it. Now here’s a novel idea: why not do it all again, only backwards!
Squeeze the suspension and release it on the ramp to grab yourself a wee bit more height...
Most of the challenges are hard as fossilized dino dumps and require multiple attempts to get them right
Select your route, rev her up and leap your way from barge to barge. Alone. So there’s no mid-air argie-bargie...
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