MX vs ATV Untamed
Games that try to contain elements of both simulation and arcade usually don’t succeed at either. MX vs ATV is no exception. It doesn’t help that the two are combined in ways that they never should have been. Taking off from a jump has a very arcade feel because you can get ridiculous air. Landing has a very simulation feel because you will crash horribly after falling from the aforementioned ridiculous air.
If you have played any of the earlier games in the series (including the very first one from about ten years ago), you can stop reading now because you know exactly what to expect. Absolutely nothing about most of the game has been improved. The same things you liked about the rest of the series is unchanged. The races are extreme and action packed. The same things that were frustrating and needed to be fixed still remain. The computer racers have a tendency to crash and actually appear a good 50 feet in front of you.
This brings up my biggest problem with the game and made me hate playing it. Crashing has no lasting detrimental effect on the race. Most of the time, you can crash and barely lose any time because the game respawns your vehicle so fast and many times further up the track. This can be good because the action never really slows down. The problem arises because the same applies to the computer racers and they crash all the time. Countless times during a race, I was neck and neck with a computer racer and he would crash. I would get excited because I thought I was going to gain a position. Then my hopes would be shot when I saw the opponent that crashed appear way in front of me and I ended up a couple of seconds behind him. This led to many frustrating races.
In an effort to remain family friendly, the game will automatically respawn your vehicle if it thinks you are going to drive into the crowd. Sometimes the crowd is so close to the track in some of the outdoor races that you can get respawned even though you only drifted off the track by a foot or two. This is a dumb problem to run into because it could have been fixed by simply not putting the crowd so close. This just added to the thrown together feel of the game.
The difficulty and computer’s skill is also horribly scaled. You have the option to choose the difficulty before each race. Most of the races I can win by insane margins on the first two difficulties (so much so that I entertained myself by driving across the finish line in reverse), but I still regularly get dead last on any super cross stadium event on the easiest setting. The computer opponents don’t maintain the same skill during a whole race either. During some segments, they will race so well that you will have no chance at catching up with them. Then suddenly, they will decide that they must slam on their brakes to make a wide turn that you don’t even have to let off the gas for. There were also times when they would slow down on straight sections for no reason. This made my close wins feel more like luck than skill.
This game does add some new events that allows you to race as monster trucks, stadium trucks, or dune buggies. I personally very much enjoyed these events, I think because they remove the ability to crash since you can’t fall off of these vehicles like the bikes or ATVs. Actually, the monster truck events are more fun than Monster Jam, which is sad since that game is devoted entirely to monster truck racing. Unfortunately there aren’t very many of these events since they are more of a bonus gimmick than a main gameplay feature. Oh, and here’s a random fact. Apparently monster trucks have better acceleration than any other vehicle in the game. Talk about realism.
The physics are way too random to be relied upon. Most of the time, if you hit a box on the side of the track, the box will go flying but your vehicle will stay on it’s path. Every once in a while, those same boxes will stay stationary and throw your vehicle into the air which would cause you to crash. There was one race I recall where I took a turn way too wide and ended up riding the guard rail around the corner. When I hit the same rail in the same spot at about the same speed on the next lap, it was completely destroyed and I went flying off the cliff on the other side. During the start of a race with a bunch of other racers, you will bounce around between them with almost no control and it looks terribly unrealistic. It seems like they are using the same physics engine that the series has been using for a while. This was fine a few years ago, but doesn’t stand up today.
While MotorStorm on PS3 seemed determined to show us what the future of off road racing games could look like, MX vs ATV seems content to remind us what they used to look like. Aside from some better up close textures, nothing is improved from the last game. The flyover of the track before the event looks terrible. The ground is blotchy and unrealistic. The trees stand out and don’t look like they belong in the environment. The vehicles look good, but don’t begin to compare to other games. Tire tracks in the mud are either real looking or simply solid lines on the ground, seemingly at random. When you hit any kind of large bump, your tire will go toward the wheel well and become part of the fender for a moment until it falls back into place. When crashing, your body will almost always go right through your bike or ATV. These types of clipping problems really don’t have a place in next gen games.
The game can be fun at times, but it is the same exact fun as the last game in nearly every way. If you love the series and haven’t played the last couple of games, this could be worth checking out to see what has been added. Otherwise, there are too many problems that have remained in the series for far too long for me to recommend this game. If you need some off road action, MX vs ATV Unleashed (the last game in the series) or Motorstorm can be picked up for a much better price by now.
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