From the studios of Milestone, the developers of Superbike World Championship and World Rally Championship, comes their next motorcycle driven racing game. Are you ready to take on the MX world? Were they?

Read our review to find out.

Welcome to the world of MX. Where dirt and mud are thrown about with reckless abandon but the dirt bikes are pretty easy to ride. The world of motorcross is usually an unforgiving world of dirt, sometimes mud, blood and usually tears from seeing your lap time destroyed because you took a turn too fast and put your bad boy down and most of the riders passing you up. Not so much in this game.

Do not mistake this title for a sim racer. It is an arcade style game with plenty of forgiveness as long as you either turn off Scrub, or master the simple technique. What is a Scrub you ask? The Scrub is basically a trick move that begins by holding down the scrub button prior to launching from a jump. Hold the button down as you climb up the hill, then release it once you’ve launched and completed your table-top or tail whip. If you time it correctly you’ll receive a nice boost upon landing that can give you a leg up on the competition. Interesting concept that can be very effective, but short jumps end badly when you hit the track mid Scrub.

MUD features official licenses from MX1, MX2 and MXoN that includes eighty four real riders, thirty two teams, sixteen nations, and every track from every circuit. That’s a lot of content packed into one title. Game modes give you the choice of joining in on the vast MUD World Tour with fifteen different sections, each with three or four events. Competing in races, and pulling off scrubs and tricks, earns you cash which in turn is used to unlock events, new riders, tricks, and upgrade your riders.

There are five different types of events:

• Race is just a straight up, full rack, sprint from the start and get it on race.
• Elimination Cup will start out just like a Race, but watch the timer because when it runs out, the person in last will be eliminated.
• Checkpoint Race will have you going as far and as fast as you can, going through as many checkpoints as possible in the allotted time.
• Head-to-Head is you against one of the best, and this mode is very unforgiving. It takes an almost flawless run, with plenty of near perfect scrubs, to beat whoever you are up against.
• Trick Battle gives you a set amount of time, several stationary ramps, and an awesome dirt bike to pull off as many tricks as you can. There is a lot of fun to be had here, once you unlock all of the different tricks.

Also included is Official Mode. Here you can jump into a quick race, start a championship race, or race against the World in Motorcross Nations. A championship race will have to racing in twelve different locations around the World and keeps track of your points as you compete in each race.

Gameplay is, as we said before, very arcade like, and also very forgiving. One of the major flaws is the fact that respawns are very quick, but at the same time you can be run over immediately after spawning. This is bad for two reasons. One, getting run over and crashed out seconds after crashing yourself sucks. Two, if you are flying along, making up for lost time and someone spawns in front of you, crashing with no chance to avoid them sucks as well. Honestly, not having at least a few seconds of invulnerability after respawning is a fatal flaw for any game, especially for a racer like this.

The graphics for the game are OK. I wouldn’t rate them as top notch for a console or PC, but they aren’t hard on the eyes either. The tracks are a great replica of real tracks and the bikes are pretty well detailed. Monster Energy seems to rule the advertising world in the FIM and they are very prevalent here as well. Riders uniforms are a pretty good match to real world riders as well and fans of the sport will be pleased with that. As for the music, I had to turn that off completely as I’m not a fan of people screaming at me and calling it music. If you like that genre of music, you’ll love the soundtrack. Me, not so much.

MUD – FIM Motocross World Championship is a fun game, and in the end that should be all that really matters. It is clearly not a sim, and if that’s what you are looking for, look elsewhere. This is arcade racing on a dirt bike, with just a few flaws.

Good job Milestone team.

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