Can MotoGP 08 take the win to be come champion?
If you love motorbike racing games then this one is a very good place to start, having played the original MotoGP back in the days of the original Xbox I was very impressed with the improvements in this version. The controls are very easy to pick up and the handling of the bikes is very easy to master, even for someone like me who predominantly plays car racing games. The graphics in game are very impressive although there are some areas that could of been better. Sometimes you will notice some small jagged edges on the rider and the bike. I feel there could of been a bit more detail in the track areas, but most of this is being picky as half the time you wont see any of this speeding down the track at 200 mph on a Moto GP bike.
The game first starts off with a tutorial circuit which includes some helpful tips as your going along and trying to get to grips with the controls, most of the time the tips will give you encouragement on how well your doing, if your not doing so well the tips will give you ways to help improve your riding. I would suggest doing the tutorial especially if you haven't had a motorbike racing game before.
There are 3 main classes in career mode, 125cc, 250cc and MotoGP. Only 125cc will be unlocked when you first start, as you win races you earn points which unlocks different teams and bikes within the 3 main classes, earn enough points and you can unlock them all. During the game you get the chance to unlock different upgrades for your bike to help improve top speed, acceleration, brakes and traction. If you earn enough points per race you can also unlock new helmets for the riders. Before you set off for each race you also have the choice to set your bike settings manually for each race, you can adjust the tyre compound, suspension and a few other things to try and get the edge over other bikes, 90% of the time I'll leave mine to the computer but there is the choice should you need it.
In race, as I have mentioned before there are a few small detail errors but nothing that would spoil the fun of the game. The main glitch that I seem to see on my tv is that the horizon seems to have blotches, sometimes looking as if there are riders going around corners in the distance, although I'm sure that they can fix this in a game update.
There were however a couple of let downs for me. For one there is no in race music at all even though in the menu system it has music set on as default the music for the game only seems to be in the menus and not in the race, so your racing around for 5 laps at a time some for 2 mins per lap with just the sound of the bike, which ok to some would be fine but after a few hours of riding around the circuits can be a little annoying and having you reaching for the Hi-Fi remote. The other thing for me is that even though this is a MotoGP racing game there is no commentary at all, I would of expected some sort of commentary for this type of game, but then again that maybe just me. Finally the one thing that I was hoping for was customization of the bikes and riders, even very simple graphic games such as Guitar Hero has the options to customize your characters, so I feel that MotoGP is missing a trick with this one.
If your new to these types of games then I would start the game on easy for the first season and then slowly increase the difficulty as you become more confident, I personally found easy to be far to easy. I you have played quite a lot of racing games in the past be it car or bike racing I would start of putting it on Medium setting to give yourselves more of a challenge.
If they update the game to have in game music and sort out a few detail issues and add in customization options for riders and bikes (leather styles/colours, bike styles/colours, even adding in gaining sponsors like in Racedriver:GRID) then this would of been closer to a 9.5 for me but because of these it only got a very respectable 8.5/10