Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Gravity Games Bike: Street. Vert. Dirt.

Written by Matt Partington on August 02, 2002

Full Review: I hope you like punching yourself in the face!

Every genre has its sour grapes. Every genre has its rehashes and retrogrades. Every genre has those games that should just be ignored. Gravity Games Bike is one of these titles. It's not that Gravity Games Bike is an absolutely terrible game, but it doesn't even come close to competing with those great games like Aggressive Inline and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3. The good ones have fun, inventive gameplay with great visuals with bit of spice and freshness. GGB has nothing of this sort, and a whole lot less. Instead it takes great concepts from successful titles, and butchers them to an uninspired and flawed hell.

Gravity Games Bike seats you as a BMX rider. Just like most all extreme-sports games, GGB features a Career mode. You'll choose a biker, and trek across a series of courses with 10 goals each. This is all too familiar, considering most of the objectives have been directly ripped from other games such as grabbing letters to spell out a word. Other things include hitting cans, jumping gaps, or grinding particular poles. You get three-minute time slots to accomplish as many goals as possible. The more you complete, the more levels, bikes, and courses are unlocked. [Cue sarcasm] Yay! Career mode also has Competitions where you compete against other bikers in a vert course, dirt course, and street course. This game mode isn't done entirely bad, and might actually be fun if it wasn't for the unoriginality and tawdry gameplay. Other modes include Quick Start, Free Ride, and a few multi-player games, none of which you'll end up playing much.

GGB's gameplay is the epicenter for its poor state. Flaws and obstructions plague the entire experience. Each bike controls like a shopping cart with two wheels; a cart with three wheels is a dream compared to this. As you might know, shopping carts aren't very good at pulling off tricks. Each maneuver requires precise timing. If you miss, your biker will be severely punished and a pool of blood will soon appear on the ground. Landing is a hassle. Instead of some type of strategy and skill, your best off just not touching any button and hope you'll magically get a good touchdown (this game has a lot of Уmagic,Ф like disappearing into walls!). The game requires more luck than skill, so go fetch your rabbit's foot and lucky penny!

A few more months in the shop and Midway could've solved many of GGB's horrid flaws. Some of the more -- uh -- interesting ones are hanging off the corner of a vert ramp by your back tire, or vanishing into solid concrete only to emerge twenty yards down. Respawning is quite peculiar. If you get killed in a hazard, it will respawn you on that hazard, only leading into a series of duplicate deaths. That, or you respawn on the total opposite side of the course. Very occasionally will you respawn in a good, accurate spot. There's plenty other mysterious faults in the game that make you say УWhat? How could they miss that?Ф It's so frustrating considering the faults easily could've been solved, and made the game double the value of what it is now. These aren't mere blemishes. No, they're ugly messy problems that should've been dealt with before release.

The point and trick system is totally lopsided. You can continue to do a trick over and over again, and the point value will never decrease. This makes earning high scores a sinch with good bikers. It's aggrivating in Competition mode when you pump out the moves one after the other, non-stop, give this amazing vert performance, then only earn an average score. What's up with that? I'm not sure what exactly they want you to do, but giving a stellar performance isn't one of 'em. It's particularly odd in street competition, when you give grind after grind after grind then get a terrible score. In many of the levels, the will make you dizzy. It turns, shakes, and jerks constantly. Some levels are practically unwatchable because the camera is jumping around so much.

The graphics go along with the gameplay pretty well--sloppy. Even though the textures aren't half bad, every course has this bland and dull feeling. Instead of making smaller, quality arenas to trick in, they made relatively large arenas where there's nowhere to trick. Most of your time will involve pedaling around, trying to grind off of this, crashing. Trying to jump off of this, crashing. Trying to flip off of this, landing on your head. The visuals are unattractive, and while they aren't as bad as some games on the PS2, still rank near the bottom. More discussion on the visuals is not necessary, I'll just further depress myself.

We're on a roll tonight! Terrible gameplay, shoddy graphics, and atrocious defects! Can't get much worse than this...or can it? Yes, it can! The audio is mediocre at best, backed up with repetitive sound effects and songs that are better not listened to. A problem with the sound effects is that they occur at the wrong times. You might go up a ramp and hear that loose chain sound, but it'll continue for a minute or so, even when you're not in the air. It's fairly evident that Midway chose the gaudy way out, and got the rights to b-side songs from remotely known artists, then got two or three songs from fairly well-known bands. This way they could put the artists name on the box, make more money because of it, and spend a lot less cash. Ingenious!

Sure, there are worse games than GGB, but it brings nothing to the table. Nothing new, nothing good, nothing fun, zero! While you might be able to squeeze a very few rare fun moments out of the game, you'll be spending more time hating it than loving it. Cheats can enhance the gaming experience, but you'll probably be punching yourself in the head for purchasing the game before considering using codes. This is what you get when a game is released six months before it should be. GGB could've been a mediocre game, but it doesn't even get close at its current state.