Sunday Muddy Sunday
MX vs. ATV Reflex gives the franchise a much-needed injection of freshness, but is it enough?
Published: December 18, 2009
The Rider Reflex system isn't just a gimmick; it fundamentally changes the way the series is controlled. Shifting weight in opposite directions between vehicle and rider can have dramatic results (oft-times painful ones), but properly corralled, the ability to pitch weight into corners and, to a lesser degree, to help correct botched takeoffs helps you feel far more connected to the moment-to-moment moves than perhaps any other racer out there.
But it's not perfect -- at least not for me. I've spoken to a couple other people that seemingly had no trouble adjusting while I would be stuck flinging profanities at the screen after missing just one jump in one of the games early quasi-free-roaming challenges found in Free Ride Mode. Even after hours of practice, I never really got a complete handle on things, and a lot of that is because the game's physics are simply too responsive. Or too accurate. Or not accurate enough. I honestly don't know what about the driving model can cause a bike to go off a jump almost in a flat spin, but the resulting bail only caps off the sudden, surprising lack of control.
Again, when the game works -- and it will more often than not once you've graduated to buggies and trucks -- it instills a kind of zen-like bliss about the racing experience. The problem is that gulf between being in the zone and introducing your crotch to a trackside tree is so massive even Evel Knievel couldn't jump it. Things are most pronounced when dealing with the gouged sluices cut into the tracks on circuit races. Because the vehicles respond to every bump, subsequent laps can end up feeling different from the first one, but the tracks are often chewed up a bit anyway, so the result is the same: unexpected bails.
There's little you can do about it, other than to try to match the path of other riders and pray for a smooth ride through, but invariably something will happen that causes you to lose balance (at which point a sort of micro-game where you have to quickly push the right stick in the direction of an on-screen arrow to avoid bailing will kick off). Ditching your bike in the muck isn't nearly as bad, though, as the feeling of being utterly out of control coming out of a blind corner and then soaring off the course at an odd angle. Riding a bike is often a struggle to just keep the damn thing on the course consistently rather than being about taking jumps and using the game's semi-clunky trick system of holding a shoulder button and then tapping out a handful of different moves on the right analog stick. If you're obsessive about finishing in first, be forewarned: you will restart. A lot.
If the catastrophic lows of constantly flying off the course or being thrown off a jump at an angle that can't possibly be recovered from were meted by the dizzying highs of finally slipping into the zone, it would be one thing, but the middle ground is often so weirdly clunky and cumbersome that the game is in a constant state of flux, bouncing from being a blissful experience where the vehicle, rider and landscape are holding hands and skipping down Happytown Lane to one where you're wishing all manner of horrible things to befall the demonic hellspawn that created this game to torture those foolhardy enough to pick up the game to almost perpetually sitting on the cusp of "getting" it.
Ultimately, this renders much of the experience a frustrating but weirdly rewarding one. When it works, it works better than almost any other racing game out there, and when it doesn't, you're left wondering how anyone could possibly enjoy subjecting themselves to this kind of experience. Little things like having Discovery Challenges while in free ride -- essentially asking the player to find a stick in a forest -- not show up on the map once you've found them is just piling more unneeded frustration on top of everything.
