Jan
27
2011
I took my time to purchase MX vs ATV Reflex mainly because of the price and because I’ve been pretty busy lately as well. I did enjoy the prior title in the series, Untamed and played the title before that a lot, Unleashed. Reflex, however, was a huge let down and here’s why.
Firstly, the game is way too easy. I can easily win races with a large lead on the hardest difficulty. I’m not sure what this says about the game or me but it is disappointing as a player when after only playing the game for a few hours you can already win in the hardest setting. Compare this to Untamed where I had a hard time winning races on Pro and in most cases, Pro-Am. Secondly, the tracks are terribly designed. The supercross tracks especially are way too complicated for even me (And I watch it every week!) and the rhythm sections are hard to decipher at times. The nationals tracks are also unrealistic compared to real life – in the game it’s all about technicality but in the real world it is about endurance. Yes, you can’t expect a player to throw down a 20 lap moto (Imagine the lead I’d have!) but the low amount of laps means a bad start usually (especially on “All-Time”) means there is little hope for a first place spot.
While on the topic of laps, the races are way too short. A 3 lap moto is rather pointless even in the game. 5 or 7 laps would be more appropriate to test the player and let the field spread out a little and not get clumped riders which seems to be the case usually, which results in over taking 5 players at once in some cases. Another one of my gripes is the so called “qualifying” before the national races (pops up later in the game). You essentially ride another race rather than qualifying because the qualifying race is also 3 laps (Like moto 1 and 2). Compare this to real life where qualifying is a time trial based deal and lap times aren’t affected by the random rider flying sideways into you because of the horrible physics.
In MX vs ATV Reflex there is no concept of weight. I have done frontflips and backflips by nudging people… and landing it! Almost always you will crash if your front wheel even comes close to another ride but on the other hand if you come up short there is a good chance you’ll ride away. There has been numerous times where a bot has flipped me around in the other direction by simply nudging me which ruins my race. The game has no grasp of reality – banging bars and being aggressive is part of racing. On the same note, the AI is completely stupid. I can recall seeing the leader fly off the track for seemingly no reason, or other bots just fly off the track, again, for no reason. The game becomes more of a joke when even the bots have a hard time staying on the track let alone the player. And on this note, the rules about going off track are retarded. Normally if riders go off track and re-enter the track without gaining any positions or cut the track it is fine however accidentally going wide results in 3 second penalties. I guess it doesn’t matter because you’ll most likely end up with a 10 second lead!
The controls are vastly different to previous games and once you get used to them, they’re alright however they’re poorly designed. For example, leaning weight off a jump doesn’t always mean I intend to do a whip, especially if I’m 2 feet off the ground – and this will always result in a crash. With that said, at least the game acknowledges what a whip is. The way tricks are performed, especially flips, has kind of improved but become worse at the same time. Finally the throttle does something to help a flip which is good but the normal tricks are annoying to pull off because of the hard-to-memorize trick list. They also got names of common tricks wrong, such as the Electric Doom – it’s not like it’s copyrighted or anything. I’ve also been able to pull off a 360 doing a “whip” which actually looks more like a 360 than what the game considers a 360, which is more of an off-axis backflip.
The general experience of the game is ruined by the poorly created “time line” so to speak or “event series”. In previous games, real life riders such as Carmichael would only appear on “All-time” difficulty which seems appropriate considering his skill in real life. In Reflex I saw James Stewart come last in a rookie race! The fastest man on the planet never comes last unless he crashes. It is also disappointing to see Supercross and Motocross racer in FMX competitions which makes no sense at all as most don’t even know a handful of tricks let alone enough to win competitions! The arrangement of competitions is also confusing and seems lazy. The event series for each race type in the game are also short at first but then become relatively long. It would only seem reasonable that the different classes of bikes would race all the tracks in one series. Instead the game designers tacked on random events to the end of another series; truck races in a nationals event series for example.
The addition of truck racing is poorly implemented and the courses seem ridiculous. Even more irritating is when trucks are up against motorcycles; as the winner is obvious as trucks can easily run over bikes if need be and are much faster.
I’m clearly comparing the game to real life for the most part but it’s a racing game that looks real, I can only assume it should be similar at least. Even cartoon racing games have the concept of weight in them! I wouldn’t recommend this game at all; let’s hope the next one is decent.