izigame.me

This game is going in the right direction. Hear me out. This time around, I watched a lot of videos and listened to the interviews that were available before this game came out. Like many of you, I am always skeptical of Milestone. They just put out their first competent MotoGP game ever, last year. This is after 25 years of making sport bike games. None of their MX games have ever been very good and a few of them are just plain awful. The real problem on PC is that we have games that are by most metrics pretty accurate to what it is like to ride a bike in real life, namely MX Bikes and GP Bikes, but also TrackdayR. It's not just physics issues, but also input issues. Milestone has always either had an automatic input that you wish you could control or inputs with hard limits, or gameified physics systems. This is slowly changing in their games. You still can't stand or sit on command but you have more range now and it all happens quicker. Some day I still hope to see dual stick inputs in MotoGP because it works so well in GP Bikes. Honestly it could happen with how much better that series has gotten. But this isn't about MotoGP.
YOU CAN IN FACT TURN IN THIS GAME! That's amazing right? I know there was so much back and forth in all the other Milestone MX games. But in all honestly it has always been an issue. The rotation speeds were slow, weight transfers had extreme limits, traction was based on wet concrete with the occasional black ice patch, and it always felt off. The real solution was that you just got used to it or found ways to cheese the mechanics. Rotation speeds in this game are faster, not to the same level as other games but much faster. There is much less lag in the input as well, which always kinda felt like a smoothing issue but may have been a mixed issue. The control and physics system is not perfect, but it does say something, that I felt like I was competent enough, to race very quickly in this game. I wasn't trying different inputs every few turns to see if they were wanting me to do something different than what I thought I should do. Only to realize that the entire system was just off and it just didn't matter that much. That's my experience with every other Milestone MX game. Controls are much better, and overall feel pretty good on the surface.
Now the free whips and scrubs. This is not a terrible system. It's actually not really that bad at all. It looks bad from an animation standpoint but so does every animation in this game. This is an issue that has existed in these games from the beginning. If they made good animations in general a lot of skeptics would have been sold on that alone. I play in first person, so you at least you don't have to see your feet do goofy things all the time. But you also don't get to see your weird upright scrub. The air movements do indeed need to be kinda planned from the ground. You need a setup, a slight one but it is an improvement. This isn't Legends where you can do flashy whips and scrubs all over the place and look cool doing it, but it's also not MX Bikes where you can easily mess it up.
The Ai are interesting. They can actually be raced against not just lapped. That's something that also changed in MotoGP 24. It feels weird to have a Milestone game where you are actually racing the AI. This is indeed a first for them. Only took 25 years but I digress. You can actually move them on track as well. They aren't bricks on the track. It does sometimes feel good to put someone deep in a corner or slow them on a line. It's actually sometimes satisfying.
The tracks are a mixed bag but I have seen a dozen times that there are more changes coming, "don't judge them immediately", so I guess I won't. The track deformation is mostly a gimmick, a weird hyped up gimmick, but still a gimmick. I guess the track changes over time but it's not what you expect and sometimes not in ways you would expect, so I'll just leave it at that. The addition of the Milestone original tracks however are fun. They do add something to the game. I guess I personally don't really miss the compound, but no doubt some people will. The track editor is not great. I have in the past messed around with it but it's just not as in depth as I would like to really take it seriously. I am no expert though, with my lack of time with it, but every time I open it I just want more.
Overall we have a decent game here and this is literally my first time saying that. Still not ground breaking, still not the best it could be, but definitely Milestone's best so far.
Also, I've had a couple days with this game on the PlayStation, if you wonder how I could say any of this with only couple hours played on Steam.