Full Review: You can fly oh so high…
THQ is back in the running with the latest dirt biking addition to the X-Box’s arsenal, and they made one hell of a return at that. Easily one of the better of the genre since Excite Bike for the N64, MX Superfly mixes the perfect amount of both racing and tricking, with a beautiful emphasis on gameplay rather than gorgeous graphics or crisp sound (though it generally has those as well). Featuring a multitude of big name riders, including everyone’s favorite, Ricky Carmichael, Superfly actually steers you more towards creating your own rider and then building a career with him.
The career mode is the more racing-based side of the game – after all, you do simply compete in a series of races over a variety of locales and bike types. These races are generally somewhere between pretty difficult and reasonably easy, right at that spot where it’s fun to do it again but not frustrating, a very important balance that many developers these days don’t seem to manage. The rider AI is pretty impressive, and you’ll even find them doing cool things like making completely random mistakes – as in you can run the same part of the track over and over and they screw up in different places. It’s one of those small things that just makes the game more enjoyable. As you progress up the ladder and earn more cash you’ll find that not only do the races get longer, faster and more intense, but they also manage to get really, really good looking – some of the tracks, while lacking simple dirt spray effects and some other minor things, are absolutely gorgeous. And of course there’s more than the fair share of option air available – while you can opt to not take the big jumps higher than you need to at the cost of speed, you can get what is sometimes an excessive amount of air by spring loading your bike for that extra umph, thus enabling you to do some insane tricks.
The trick system of the game is decent, if a bit of a change from other genres of extreme sports – the face buttons correspond to trick when in the air, as they often do. But timing comes into play here – there are three categories of button presses (fast, a tap, and a hold) that alter whichever trick you’re going to do (and for how long), and those are combined with other button presses (up to three for one move, including the “experimental” moves, some of which are not listed). Depending on what kind of gamer you are, this may be the best part of the game for you – if you’re into the whole BMX deal then this is certainly your bag – there’s loads of courses that are so ripe with trick opportunities it’ll make you giddy, and they’re all real purdy at that.
Now, of course, a game of this sort would not be complete without mini-games, which are luckily very plentiful: Bus Jump, Pizza Delivery, Moto-Slalom, Moto-Golf, and Big Air are just some of those which make appearances. And, evidently, Wheelball (MX’s version of the Excite Bike 64 soccer) makes a big appearance and will guarantee you and some friends far too much fun. Naturally there’s also a built in track editor, so if you get bored of MX’s impressive variety of single and multi-player modes and levels you can go and create some of your own.
Speaking of replay-ability, MX also has Live support – not for actual online play, but you can download updates (in fact, there are already new riders and bikes that you can download) for the game as they become available. While some of the riders look a little… obscure to say the least, they do get the idea across, much like the rider you can create, though the customizations tend to stick to suit color, make and the like.
Graphically, MX is very impressive – while there isn’t a lot of new and amazing stuff going on, it certainly isn’t ugly, and the levels are all wonderfully rendered and detailed, even if some of the rider animations are a little off at times. Likewise, the audio is more than decent; with the sounds you’d expect from such a game. and some great audio tracks as well – the theme song is particularly catchy in fact.
