POSTED 30/5/11


MX VS ATV ALIVE

THQ
PS3 (also on Xbox 360)

Damn, technology’s awesome. THQ have reanimated James Stewart to promote this latest in their series of dirt-encrusted two-wheel versus four-wheel racers!

What’s that? James Stewart the motocross racer? Also into impersonating police officers? Definitely not Jimmy ‘Vertigo’ Stewart then? Damn, there goes all our “So, do THQ give us the moon?” A-list schtick. Guess we’ll have to settle for the B stuff...

But seriously folks, if you haven’t tripped over any of the four prior incarnations of MX vs ATV, imagine an updated remix of SEGA’s classic Enduro Racer, with four-wheeled bikes and options.

These bikes – no matter how many wheels - are wholly different beasties to cars control-wise. On top of worrying about accelerationy and steery kinda stuff, what you do with your virtual body matters too. Lean too hard into a corner – splat! Lean too far back over a jump – splat! Lean too... you get the picture. This makes learning to control the machines here quite the challenge, especially those futher-mucking-why-I-oughta ATV bastards. Oh, and that’s with assists!

You hurtle around a too small selection of tracks (front extra $$$s to get a decent selection – BOO!) with more undulations than the average teenager’s face. Or, go freebal... erm, free riding about a handful of open landscapes where you can let rip stunts at will, and score much-needed XP points – ’cos without them you’re stuck with mucho locked tracks. A racing RPG? Oh fucking joy.

There’s something generally twitchy about proceedings, so this isn’t for somebody who wants a quick, pick-up-and-blat racer. Given time it’s OK fun, but when Pure came out years ago and still owns it in the ATV stakes, well...

And then she turned and ran into the church. We tried to follow, but it was too late... Oh yeah, wrong Jimmy Stewart. Bugger.

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