MX vs. ATV Unleashed
Rainbow does what it does best, but is that good enough anymore?
Published: April 11, 2005
I’ve been retarded for Rainbow Studios’ heady mix of dead-on-yet-undeniably-fun physics and simple gameplay since I was first sucked into their debut project, Motorcycle Madness for Microsoft on PCs everywhere almost a decade ago. Since then, I’ve seen them tackle ATV racing for Sony and Sea-Doo racing for Atari before they were finally snapped up by a very wise THQ.
The results have been good for THQ. Under their roof, Rainbow has continued to craft some of the most engrossing 2-wheeled racers around, and with their latest MX vs. ATV Unleashed, they’ve combined two similar racers they’ve had more than enough time to get familiar with into a PBJ sandwich of delicious racing bliss.
It was a marriage that was bound to happen, of course; ATV and motocross racing is just too damned similar and shares too much in the course designs for someone to not notice it eventually, and it’s all the better that Rainbow finally made the move, but they didn’t stop at two types of vehicles, they went all in, offering helicopters, golf carts, monster trucks, airplanes, baja-style trophy trucks, more or less everything you can imagine would function in one of Rainbow’s little hilly sandboxes.
This is great for variety’s sake, and when the vehicles are kept on the ground, it makes for a nice diversion, eventually blossoming into a way to re-experience the tracks once you’ve exhausted the career and tournament modes, which will take weeks, if not months to finally wrap up for casual players. The problem is, the game does take more than a glancing pass at introducing these vehicles into the main gameplay, and when you’re forced to take the reins of an unwieldy plane, it turns the game into a test of anger management instead of introducing something truly new into the mix.
So, it’s a botched attempted at adding air-based vehicles to tried-and-true formula, which is fine, since everyone needs to experiment. The problem is, once you realize this, the same grind of hitting tournament and progressing through the single-player game gets tedious, mainly because you’ve done all this before. Even playing online just fels This is, for better or worse, MX Unleashed with some very minor improvements and some backtracking away from the cooler open-ended process for starting races, which is a real shame.
The controls haven’t changed too much, aside from some of the pre-loading sequences for the backflip and the all-new sideways 360, both of which now require that you hold in one direction as you go off the jump, then quickly tap back the opposite way and then back to your original starting point to kick off the move. From there, the usual set of tricks can be pulled off by pressing Triangle or Circle and a direction on the d-pad or analog stick to pull off the move. Holding R1 (which is also needed for the flips and spins) will tweak the trick to help you go big when in the air.
The core of the game is still proper clutching at the starting gate, while going up hills/jumps and coming out of narrow turns where a shallow wall won’t give you the proper time to set up, pre-loading the suspension on jumps for just the right amount of air so you can take the peaks and valleys of jump runs perfectly. Coupling these two techniques and their many uses gives you a sense of control and balance that no other racing game can offer, and it’s the reason why Rainbow is so good at what they do.
The results have been good for THQ. Under their roof, Rainbow has continued to craft some of the most engrossing 2-wheeled racers around, and with their latest MX vs. ATV Unleashed, they’ve combined two similar racers they’ve had more than enough time to get familiar with into a PBJ sandwich of delicious racing bliss.
It was a marriage that was bound to happen, of course; ATV and motocross racing is just too damned similar and shares too much in the course designs for someone to not notice it eventually, and it’s all the better that Rainbow finally made the move, but they didn’t stop at two types of vehicles, they went all in, offering helicopters, golf carts, monster trucks, airplanes, baja-style trophy trucks, more or less everything you can imagine would function in one of Rainbow’s little hilly sandboxes.
This is great for variety’s sake, and when the vehicles are kept on the ground, it makes for a nice diversion, eventually blossoming into a way to re-experience the tracks once you’ve exhausted the career and tournament modes, which will take weeks, if not months to finally wrap up for casual players. The problem is, the game does take more than a glancing pass at introducing these vehicles into the main gameplay, and when you’re forced to take the reins of an unwieldy plane, it turns the game into a test of anger management instead of introducing something truly new into the mix.
So, it’s a botched attempted at adding air-based vehicles to tried-and-true formula, which is fine, since everyone needs to experiment. The problem is, once you realize this, the same grind of hitting tournament and progressing through the single-player game gets tedious, mainly because you’ve done all this before. Even playing online just fels This is, for better or worse, MX Unleashed with some very minor improvements and some backtracking away from the cooler open-ended process for starting races, which is a real shame.
The controls haven’t changed too much, aside from some of the pre-loading sequences for the backflip and the all-new sideways 360, both of which now require that you hold in one direction as you go off the jump, then quickly tap back the opposite way and then back to your original starting point to kick off the move. From there, the usual set of tricks can be pulled off by pressing Triangle or Circle and a direction on the d-pad or analog stick to pull off the move. Holding R1 (which is also needed for the flips and spins) will tweak the trick to help you go big when in the air.
The core of the game is still proper clutching at the starting gate, while going up hills/jumps and coming out of narrow turns where a shallow wall won’t give you the proper time to set up, pre-loading the suspension on jumps for just the right amount of air so you can take the peaks and valleys of jump runs perfectly. Coupling these two techniques and their many uses gives you a sense of control and balance that no other racing game can offer, and it’s the reason why Rainbow is so good at what they do.