Horrendous load times make this game a real drag to play.
The game is basically a dirt bike, or ATV, racing game. You can compete in tons of different competitions and get more points to unlock more gear, bikes, and pretty much everything.
The controls are very different from the PS2 games. So if you have played a previous ATV game on the PS2, this’ll take a good 3 minutes to get used to. If not, it’s basically the same time to learn. It’s very easy to get used to the controls and you’ll be ready to start racing.
The game offers tons of different modes to play from. You can play in the tournaments, such as freestyle and racing tournaments. You can play some fun mini-games, and you can free ride.
The tournaments are the best part because there are so many of them. You’ll start off with 2 tournaments open and you have to unlock the rest. There are a total of 8 tournaments, and over 15 areas to race in. The game time will be a good 15 hours because of all the things available in the game.
However, despite the fact that there are so many tracks to race in, they all feel very repetitive. You’ll race in a different track, which is named after a city, and it’ll feel like you are repeating the same track.
The game doesn’t feature the championship style racing as in the ATV Offroad Fury games. In those, you would pick a tournament, and you would get points for your standings in each race. This one just gives you a gold medal for every single track, if you get first place, rather than giving you a gold medal for your overall performance.
The load times are horrendous, and it takes about a good minute or so to be able to actually start a race. You’ll choose everything you want, and then you’ll have to wait a long time for it to begin.
Load times are also affected when choosing bikes, gear, and everything else. You’ll press down to preview something else, and you’ll have to wait to see what the bike, or whatever, looks like. The load times are ridiculous and incredibly long.
The music is not the best. And this does not support custom soundtrack. So you can’t just listen to your own music while playing this game.
Collision can be a nuisance as if you don’t land appropriately, you’ll end up falling to the ground. Then you are forced to watch a scene of you falling, and you can’t skip it, which allows your opponent to get ahead of you really fast. Tricks in this game are really fun, but are also very limited. You have 16 different tricks to do, four of them which are the same but are called something else. You have no option to purchase different tricks or even edit your tricks. And each vehicle has the same tricks. So you’ll be doing the same tricks on your MX that you were doing on your ATV.
When you complete a race, you’ll be given points, or cash. That can be taken to the store to purchase tons of different gear, and different vehicles. Unlike the ATV Offroad Fury games where you could only purchase ATV’s, here you can purchase ATV’s, MX’s, Monster Trucks, Golf Carts, Trophy Cars and more! There is so much to buy and so much to show off to everybody.
MX vs. ATV only supports Ad-Hoc racing rather than Infrastructure, meaning that you can only race with a friend near you, who has a copy of the game, rather than using the internet to race with somebody miles away from you. The fact that there is no Infrastructure really makes this game boring.
Overall the game is ok. It’s fun to play and try to beat as it will have you playing for an incredibly long time, but it’ll have you bored in a minute, and have you waiting for an even longer time. When you finish, the only option you have is to play against a friend as there is no online play in the game. The game is more of a rent than a buy. It’s good, but you’ll get bored of it real easily.