A good attempt at keeping their great series alive but does this one deliver?
Its quite obviously a racing game. They have incorporated all the Moto GP 06 tracks into this game and all the new team driver line ups and liveries. This accompanied by a good graphic tweak than that of the Xbox makes this a really good collectors game for a fan of the actual series. To add to this they have included (like in the other games before it) a custom option to do up your own bike colours and leathers so you can really have a unique looking bike. This is done through in game clip art images and shapes that you can resize and move around the bikes bodywork. It’s a nice touch however you feel that 8 layers isn't enough when games like Forza have a 100 layers per each side of the vehicle.
That’s the aesthetics out of the way, how does this game play?
The answer to this is quite well but hold up. I strongly believe the best version of this game was the 2nd one. The one they debuted with Xbox live. This has to be the most complete racing game ive ever played to date. MotoGp06 has a few problems that for some reason have been picked up and unresolved post the 2nd game. Ill explain more about this later lets get back to the game.
Unlike ant racing game you may have ever played, this one is done on a bike. You may be laughing at that last line and for those who may never have played a back racing game before track position is everything on a game like this. You simply cannot log in and finish the race in 1st on your first attempt. All the friends who ive seen play this game and claimed to be good racers perform poorly as they simply haven’t ever tried to race properly. With bikes you have to compensate for lean time and if you are in the wrong position on the track you simply cant tack a corner of 90 degrees like you would in a car racing game. Braking leaning and actual speed into every corner is of critical importance if you are to play this game well. If you are a very arcady gamer then this game may not be for you. This game also features am arcady race type called the extreme series where you drive on tracks that are mainly straighter and less aggressive with some of the corners. On top tof that the bikes in the extreme series handle a little sharper and you can execute drift slides which make the control of the bike much easier. If you manage to become really good at the extreme racing your skills doesn’t necessarily transfer directly into good skill when you attempt to race on the real tracks. Sliding for example becomes much more difficult and often hazardous.
This game also features an online scoring system which I think is really good. Every time you race a race your time gets recorded and saved onto your Xbox. Im not sure if these times get put into the xboxlive database if the Xbox is not online or you have to race with a signed in connection to get your time put in the database. This feature is great as you can see just how well in the world your time stands.
The other scoring thing on this game is the seed ranking. This is a rank that starts at 100 and goes down to 1 if you win races. This seed is a good way to see how many people may be new to the game and will give you an indication of how they will perform in your created games (all this if you are online of course). This ranking will go down (or up) in the offline mode. You must however race the higher difficulty settings if you want to get a ranking of 1.
All that said, this game does a really good job of portraying how a bike would feel if you were really riding one.
Now for the problems. It’s a shame that a good game like this has any but there are a few that absolutely do my head in.
1. Communicating online. Im not sure what it is but on some of the online games ive been in I haven’t been able to hear someone or they haven’t been able to hear me. Most of the time I can hear the host but they cant hear me and I cant hear anyone else talking even though their names are glowing yellow to symbolise speech. Not sure what that is but it existed in MotoGp3 as well
2. There was a problem accessing the scoreboards – this fault has plagued me a few times and what it does is repeatedly put this error box in your screen and it will not go away. You must log out of the room and log back in which is forever a pain as I sit whole championships with my friends and you have to lost all your score. If you continue to play all the same with this error any time you set will never be placed onto the scoreboards and god have I set some cracking times with this error on my screen.
3. Brakes On but how? What I mean by this is, if you change your controls mid game pressing accelerate also puts on a brake. Ive done it a few times changed my A button to do front brake instead of rear brake. When I get back to the game the bike revs but doesn’t go anywhere, its really annoying.
4. Overall Ranking. At the moment im at 14000. Why? My times on the official tracks are in the top 2000 so shouldn’t I be between 1004(my best) and 8456(my worst). Apparently not. To get an accurate ranking you must complete time on ALL of the tracks GP and Extreme. Now I hate the arcade extreme mode and never played it unless my mates have said lets have a go. So unless you want a real accurate ranking of you performance do all the races (this isn't really a problem but they could have done a GP table and a Extreme table rather than having the two combined)
5. The computer controlled AI is possibly the worst ive ever seen. Even on legendary the computer has no sense to hold or try to take position. They simply stick on the racing line and do the speed. That is if you make a mistake on a corner, anyone behind you will travel the same line and at racing speed and 100% of the time knock you off. Surely there could have been a small chuck of code added to say “if next opponent = P1 && speed < 20% of CPU max speed; alter course || speed = 40%” Basically the code for bikes behind you changed if your overall speed is not a comparison to the oncoming bikes, this will prompt the cpu to chose another waypoint through the corner or simply reduce their speed (very sorry to you coders, it’s a bad example but if you would like a thorough code snippet id be happy to supply :/)
Overall the game is great fun but there is a large learning curve to play it well. Its not as simulation as the 2nd one but all the tracks are there and its an acceptable racer that will still appeal to you “NO ARCADE GAMES” players.