Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: MX Unleashed

Written by Chris Reiter on April 02, 2004

Full Review: Oh my gosh. The finish line is so close now. I can see it. I can even feel it. I'm...oh damn't. I haven't even started the race yet!"

Best known for their ability to instill a sense of adrenaline and some messy fun into the mix through an increasing number of recent racing installments over the years, developer Rainbow Studios is back on the saddle with yet another one to add to their rщsumщ. Published by the company's new owner, THQ, MX Unleashed is not Rainbow Studios' first entry into the world of motocross racing. Although, you can bet your engine revving, high-octane pulsing, tricked out styling self that MX Unleashed is one that does things a bit differently. Motocross freaks who want to go faster, higher, and farther than before: strap on your riding gear and hop onto your bike to unleash the Unleashed.
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Nothing more, nothing less. This is another year, and in it there's another dirt bike racing game -- this one. As that is, MX Unleashed is stirred in preparation with various gameplay modes fans of cruising across dusty mounds would come to expect. Amongst these are four main gameplay modes with divisional portions separated through their respective parts. Inside of these veins are: Career, Supercross and Nationals Racing, Freestyle Mode, and the Trick System. To start out with, Career is anything and everything. Career begins players off with single play, toughening against multiple A.I. riders through 46 unique dirt and bump-ridden tracks across a total of 14 progressive leagues. It's here that not only are you able to boost your best amongst seven other competitors, but there's also a Freestyle mode available that lets you fly through a wide-open course where trials such as winning a monster truck by racing against it, deploying enough tricks to obtain a set score, vying against the computer to leap from one fixed point to the next, and consecutively getting your bike to hit set destinations in a row while beating a timed clock await.
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Without checking into the Career option first, the game's ample stockpile of race tracks cannot be accessed for other purposes, though. If say you've got a friend over, or at least something that looks like a friend (a cardboard box, duct tape, a bucket, and tree branches will do), then with a spare controller and your inanimate object you'll be able to vie with one another in both Supercross (the stadium type racing modus) and Nationals tracks (the outdoor's path). Both locations recycle the same passages you've gone over in Career, except here there are five different lanes you can travel abroad by your lonesome or with that freaky carton sitting on the chair next to you. Practice, Single Race, Ghost Racing, Free Ride, and Fast Lap Attack Mode sums up these separated aspects. Practice is just as it sounds -- where you and a second player have free range over any open track to better your skills. Single Race is again for one or both players, in which you can manage either a race alone or a head-to-head with another present. Ghost Racing is the classic option that permits players to defeat a shadow of their own (a clone of themselves) in an alternate take on head-to-head. Free Ride is exactly Practice all over again, only here you and possibly that partner of yours can navigate outside the track's boundaries to uncover additional jumps. Fast Lap Attack Mode nuzzles into the last place, but still remains an important one. This feature is for improving your speed abilities to excessively demonstrate how quickly you can manipulate certain portions of each track using highlighted hit points that dictate where the sweet spots develop into fruition. If that's not enough for some useful and somewhat useless extras, then outside Career, Supercross and Nationals are the Freestyle and Trick System. Freestyle is essentially a replica of that which is found in Career, and the Trick System isn't a mode you can play in, but rather one you can play with to realign your rider with your favorite tricks.
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Getting back on track though, it's in the career mode that again matters most. While a two-player option isn't available in this destination, single players can either choose to use a famous motocross star as their own performer of stunts and stuff, or in a way create one with several item selections that can be handpicked by you -- from the gloves, to the boots, to the helmet, and even the very bike you want to ride on top of. Once your rider's ready to ship off, competing in and completing amateur episodes of races should be your next stop, as there are many segmental series locked that must be unlocked before attempting to try the rest. What it is, is that the majority of the career campaign exists in a lengthy lineup of individual sets of races. First comes four sets in one, and then five in one, and later seven in one, and so on... And as progression rises through these series, the tracks become more complicated and the other contestants along with them. The only thing you've got to worry about, however, is how to handle your vehicle through and through.
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Prepped with an intuitive instruction video, MX Unleashed is a relatively easy to understand game that even for newcomers in the motocross rallying genre, won't take too long to become a pro or at least a semipro of its style of play. This is because the cardinal rule of motocross racing is essentially physics. As they say, what goes up must come down. Every race track in Unleashed is littered with all kinds of inclines and turns that by practicing the most sufficient access points through these hurdles, will provide those players with a better chance of positioning ahead of their challengers. In an example of this, let's just say there's a hairpin turn that opens itself upon a massive mountain in which to leap over. You could slow down at the sharp curve every time and caress across the avalanche. Or you could do what a real motocrosser would do and lean into the circling path smoothly, only to adjust your bike just right so it will slingshot past the cliff and straight to the moon. Called preloading, hopping some far ways a way is almost always an essential tactic to winning the race. All you really ever need to do is to hold down on the directional pad or analog stick, and the gauge on the right side of the screen will light up. Doing so will get you farther ahead from a distance. You've just got to know when to preload in the right places, as not every turn will supply you with enough momentum to make the jump.
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By knowing what to press and when to press it nearly builds into a second nature relationship through trekking into the game as they come. Like many good racing games, MX Unleashed has a simple setup. To go you press X. To stop you press square. To turn around, squeeze X and square together. To steer, either the directional pad or the left analog stick will hit the spot for whatever your preference may be. And to get a grip on the clutch it's a go ahead with L1 (for shifting those tight corners, or simply to nab a head start at the beginning of each race in punching the clutch, then holding down and X all together). To add to these driving rules, though, MX Unleashed additionally pursues a record of stunts any rider can perform. Unleashed doesn't offer the most elaborate bag of tricks one can employ, but the tricks look fab when stringing them into the middle of a gameplay session, and provide toward the opportunity of unlocking a large list of vehicles, including a trophy truck, a dune buggy, a biplane, or even a helicopter. The more stunt points you tally, the closer you'll come to gaining any of the aforementioned rides for use in the Freestyle mode only (unfortunately). To explore MX's list of stunts, pressing either R1, triangle, or square (especially when two are put to the test at the same time) will activate specific maneuvers mapped to those buttons. Other stunts can go the way of cool stuff like pressing stop and forward at the same time to force your rider to pause the bike on its front end, or to quickly tap down when riding up a hill in order to give way to a backflip trip. Activating two or more stunts in a single duration also count toward a larger percentage of points you can then earn, which is very nice.
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Although far from becoming the primordial archetype for which all future game titles will condition their visual standards to base upon, MX Unleashed is very much still a success when it comes down to the nitty gritty of moto racing. Specifically, the neatest thing to notice about Unleashed is its racers and the mobile platforms they move along with. These items being articulated right down to the last groove, it's clear that much of MX's energies lie in its character modeling. The tires, the handle bars, those stick things in between the wheels: they're all there for you to see, and are represented very well. Wearing helmets with goggles strapped on, gloves, boots, and the gear that makes a pro look professional, the racing riders each trim a picture perfect image of a digital-made person on top of a dirt bike come to life as well.
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What's not so amazing about the game's appearance is everything else, really. There are lots of levels to burn rubber through. Along the countryside, in the woods, through the swamp, about the depth of winter, and inside packed stadiums, there's a good amount of sideline views captured.аHowever, it's that many of these stages form a similarity with one another, particularly the indoor arenas. Yeah, there's snow in the wintery mountain region or loads of trees bundled together on the forest road, but dirt on the ground is mainly just more of the same, minus the alterations of turns and bumps made for every individual track. Understandably, there's really not much you can do to make dirt anything but that. Though without the use of a deeper defining measure to make the ground stick out more, it just doesn't.
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Despite the formula for land masses not exaggerating their demeanor to the extreme, you may be one of those many who've been told in the past by your parents not to play around with mud. Here, it doesn't matter who you are; it's going to look good either way. Shredding through the earth has your bike tires ricocheting clumps of soil and spreading dust when upholding the laws of physics. Of course that's to say that physics applies to most of the goings on in the game while executing a terrific job in doing so. Riders in the game a top their chariots move fluidly and naturally whether stopping, going, turning, or driving into the air off a heightened landmark, to roost rankly and rightly after displaying an appealing 360║ backward, or to crash and wail recklessly and wrongly right after. Multitasking stunts where your rider will lean his body toward the side of the bike or grip the handle bars to unearth his legs from underneath and to stick them out the back all while in midair even show how well the bikes and the people who ride them unite uniformly so.
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Heavy on the gameplay as it is on the sound, Unleashed is a game that likes to get loud. There really aren't as many noises that originate throughout the game, but the ones that do preside are definitely for those who don't mind noises that are generally opposite of a whisper. For instance, motorbikes are not something silence is aquatinted with. Just like all the rip-roaring, engine thrusting, dirt chugging these vehicles are made possible for in real life, so do the bikes in Unleashed do all that as well. As you can imagine, those same sounds that are reminiscent of a humming chainsaw all come off as accurate to the real thing. Where else the noisy continues is in the selection for MX's listening tunes. Among a small group of lesser known alternative artists such as Trust Company, it's too bad that MX's soundtrack isn't any larger. The solid rock themes are all awesome in usage, but there aren't enough of these songs to go around. Meaning that with an estimated amount of four or five tracks in total, you'll definitely hear each of the songs play over again at some point or another and another -- which gets a bit repetitive after a while. Finally, where the motor throttling and background music are the predominant sounds, there are a few vocal bytes present throughout, though not many. Outside the audience's moaning cheers and jeers within indoor races, or as your or other characters haplessly grunt and yelp when busting their ass on gravity, there isn't anything more to consider for audio that actual persons in the game perpetrate.