MXGP Pro is functional enough to fulfill the cravings for players who want this kind of game, yet it serves as another example that developer Milestone needs to give more time and care to its franchises.
There’s a certain kind of hesitation that comes to reviewing MXGP Pro. How does a person tackle a game with the full knowledge that only a few weeks ago, they reviewed a motorcycle game by the exact same developer? Early in June developer Milestone S.r.l. released MotoGP 18, a game that seems to merely serve as an iteration on a franchise rather than an attempt at providing players with anything special. In February, Milestone released two other racing games: Gravel and Monster Energy Supercross. Later this year in November, it will put out Ride 3.
Five games in one year is baffling for any developer of any size. Even the yearly Call of Duty games are given three years of development by different studios under Activision’s employ. How does this Italian developer churn out so many titles in such a short amount of time? Is there any possibility of avoiding genre fatigue, let alone franchise fatigue?
Thankfully, MXGP Pro is not a cardboard cutout of MotoGP 18. Instead of motorcycles efficiently weaving in and out of sharp turns, motorcycles launch over muddy jumps, spraying nearly 20 tracks from across the world with dirt. This is meant to be a hardcore simulation of the sport, meaning that any player wanting a realistic experience should gravitate towards this game.
Much like last month’s game, Milestone has cornered the market on this particular version of motorcycle racing. MXGP Pro focuses on the Motocross World Championship, bringing the familiar faces and tracks from the circuit, along with a handful of modes that check the necessary boxes. Single player races featuring time attacks and one-off tracks are paired with a career mode that makes little attempt to excel at anything, while an online mode has its own problems. There’s no track editor, no zany physics playgrounds in the same vein as the Trials series, and nothing unexpected.
MXGP Pro feels like it is going to get off on the right foot with the training/tutorial mode. After creating a custom racer, players are plopped into the “Compound” to get used to the complexities of the noisy, two-wheeled beast they will be driving throughout the game. The Compound is meant to be kind of a home away from home, a wooded area with paved roads and dirty paths that cut through thick trees. It’s a pleasant enough destination and one of the highlights of the entire package. Players can merely drive around at their own pace and get used to the physics and tinker with the game’s setting.
Milestone’s included training is a bit more competent than the one in MotoGP 18. First off, someone actually narrates how players are supposed to tackle things like turns, coming out of the gate, and scrubbing (a technique where a rider shifts the weight of their bike in the air to shave of air time to get their wheels back on the ground sooner). The narration is a helpful touch but after a couple minutes its gone completely.
After learning the barebones techniques, players can then hop into a collection of training missions that promise to permanently improve how the bike handles. Better turning and control in a game that already has ruthless physics? Sign me up! The prospect of having to land a jump in a specific zone or turn through a path of flags doesn’t sound hard, especially in a training mode. Yet these basic missions reveal how unrelenting of a simulation this is.
The training does not hold players’ hands. A few text boxes and lists of do’s and don’ts come up at the beginning of each training section. After three or four “do this” sections, players must implement their knowledge into beating a section of track in a certain amount of time. I will chalk up many of my failures in MXGP Pro to not being familiar with this type of sport or game. That being said, there are many times where there is little rhyme or reason for a failed attempt at landing a jump perfectly or why the bike will flop over when taking a turn. I assumed that jumping over some dirty bumps and landing on both wheels would be easy. After about 20 minutes of babysitting every push of the gas and touch of the control sticks, I managed to beat the first round of training with half a second left on the timer.
If a developer wants its game to appeal to a more mainstream audience, there needs to be a more mainstream approach into integrating its simulation philosophies to the uneducated. Why shove such a harsh time limit down a beginner’s throat? Each round of training is like this and they only feel more overwhelming as all the different mechanics come into play.
While the training resulted in many points of frustration, it brought to light something that also plagued MotoGP 18. The loading times in MXGP Pro are tedious at best and this is glaringly obvious during the training. Because the training missions take place in the Compound one would think that Milestone could have loaded players into that single instance and let them tackle training without having to suffer through loading screens. Failing a training section, which can happen in the blink of an eye, means players will have to wait a matter of seconds to retry or start over. Moving on to the next phase requires the exact same track to load, along with a menu, and a countdown.
Few things in MXGP Pro feel seamless. When something as basic as a tutorial area must be loaded several times, it’s apparent that Milestone could have done a much better job at optimizing things. Personally, the training rounds were made even more miserable by the fact that there is no way to force music to play, or at least not one I could find. The bleak silence of the Compound punctuated by the harsh sounds of the bike’s engine and the few seconds of stock EDM during the load times felt like something out of a dystopian Mad Max small town. It’s best to just load up Spotify or something else.
On a PlayStation 4 Pro, the load times and amount of texture pop-in feel years behind the cut. I understand that Milestone’s shift to Unreal 4 has allowed it to better capture real-life tracks better but it shows that they haven’t gotten used to the engine yet. Though the rider customization comes across as deep and a bit cool, rider faces can still look pretty ugly and the crowds are somewhat laughable. The clothing and bike models really shine, showing off different manufacturers and brands. Weather effects are satisfying but especially stand out during the rain. The world of MXGP Pro is grittier and dirtier, which gives it much more life and substance. The paved turns and tracks of MotoGP 18 may be nice to drive on but they have less personality.
The touch-and-go nature of the graphics and load times only serve to amplify how spotty the gameplay can feel. The training mode attempts to prepare players for ways to shave off time and maintain speed but when crashing feels so haphazardly random, it sours the fun even more. Again, maybe it’s my inexperience with the genre but the amount of wild crashes is almost too goofy to be heartbreaking. Players are just as likely to ace a turn they thought would fail and end up face first in the mud on a jump that seemed too easy to screw up. The one saving grace is that on easier difficulties, the simple push of a button can rewind time and allow players the chance to see what went wrong and tackle that part of the track again. It’s one of the game’s coolest features and possibly one of the only ways to make actual progress for newcomers.
Some players will relish in the challenge of MXGP Pro‘s harsh simulation. After all, riding a motorcycle in real life isn’t any easier. An extreme career mode that makes tracks play out as long as possible with the AI and physics dialed up to 12 is available. The ability to tweak the bike and how it handles among other features is the kind of food that hardcore players will eat up. It’s definitely not for everyone but a necessary inclusion. Online races will have varying degrees of success as lobbies may be impossible to fill or rubber-banding will ruin any kind of fun to be had.
Milestone needs to take a break. The rushed nature of each of these games is apparent as soon as they are let out into the wild. Yearly entries in franchises rarely result in genre-defining changes, but at the minimum present a series of refinements that justify their existence. It truly is hard to see how a developer can really make any drastic or interesting changes with such a busy release schedule.
MXGP Pro may not be a cut-and-paste job even if it shares similar coding under the hood, yet it isn’t far from it. Though I enjoy this version of the sport more than the version in MotoGP 18, it does little to change the fact that this game serves to check off a small list of requirements that any racing game should have to be enjoyable. Nothing more, nothing less. To create something truly fun, time and care needs to be put into it. Maybe next year Milestone will cut their output in half and its franchises will flourish because of it.
