MX vs. ATV Unleashed
Rainbow does what it does best, but is that good enough anymore?
Published: April 11, 2005
Thing is, what they do has become pretty well known. At the risk of sounding like some greasy anti-sports fan ripping on the latest edition of Madden 2005, these games are more or less the same thing every year, with some minor improvements. They hone and refine what was already good until now, where it’s literally about as perfect from a gameplay standpoint as possible, but it’s getting way, WAY too familiar.
Rainbow needs to expand on some of the concepts introduced in MX Unleashed a bit by doing away with the menus and making things a massive cohesive world. I’m not looking for another GTA-like game with a huge world and no loading screens, just something where you can ride to your next objective. Hell, since they’re already merging their strengths, why not just incorporate everything they’ve done in the past into some kind of racing smorgasbord, complete with watercraft races? Wishful thinking, I know, but it’s still something that needs to be done – especially after so much of the same thing.
Visually, things are again pretty par for the course, which is to say they’re pretty damned impressive. The worlds are expansive, littered with vegetation (even in the desert), and offer a huge playground to explore. The framerate is solid, even with multiple riders on screen at the same time, and some of the little touches like detail textures (extra layers of texturing that add, well, detail to something that would normally just look like a big mess of mottled browns) add a lot to something that would normally look pretty drab – though you’ll only notice it on replays and there are still big streaks of tire tracks that look like big dark smears of… uh, something on the track.
Customization is left a little wanting though, and while I probably shouldn’t put this in the graphics section, it IS where you make your rider look pretty, so I suppose it fits. Even with all the pro riders, the gear and bikes just don’t seem to have too much variety. Granted, there isn’t that much in real life events either, but then this is a game, and Rainbow isn’t exactly unopposed to doing silly stuff.
If the visuals were pretty standard, the audio is almost a complete clone of previous games (at least to my unsophisticated ears). That’s not a bad thing, mind; the engines of all vehicles are throaty, have plenty of pop and give a fantastic indication of the combustion at work that helps launch these men and women off jumps to ridiculous results. The effects for everything from tires to bodies ragdolling across the track after a failed trick attempt all sound fantastic, but you’ll probably have to kill the music to hear them.
That probably won’t be too hard if you’re a fan of more eclectic music (read: a self-righteous “indy” worshipper), since you’re probably not part of the Wal-Mart shopping John Deere-riding, wrasslin’-watching crowd that eats up quasi-nu-metal tracks from bands like Pappa Roach or everybody’s love to hate ‘em band, Nickelback. Sure, there’s stuff from more guilty pleasures like Unwritten Law or the Black Eyed Peas, but even bands that I used to love like Ozomatli got some kind of rap-rock makeover that I don’t remember from shows a few years back where they wound through the crowd with infectious percussion rhythms.
So there you have it, audio, visual and gameplay offerings that are hardly anything new, and attempts to mess with that, like including the on-paper idea of planes and helicopters, just didn’t seem to meet with the best of results. That’s not saying this isn’t a good game, it is, and it’s the best the respective ATV and MX genres have seen, but after so many iterations of the same basic thing for so many years, it’s all starting to feel like the same game over and over again. If you’re looking for the defining MX or ATV game this generation, this is it, but otherwise, it might be best to see what the increased horsepower of the next generation of hardware is capable of rendering.