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Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX 2 Review
Richard Amos
08/12/2002
Ride around on one of those bike things and shout things such as ‘tight spine dude’ for the second time.
Activision O2 are milking their extreme franchiseâs to death as we expected â“ with the Birdmanâs game already on version 4, they must be feeling the strain and have now released version 2 of the Mat Hoffman endorsed BMX game. Does it pull off its tricks well? In a few respects, yes, in many others, not at all. Why? Read onâ¦
The game is structured in a âroad tripâ fashion where you progress through different levels completing challenges one by one in a set time limit of 2 minutes. The challenges are most often outlined as âcollect 5 [insert object name here]âsâ and sometimes change to âcollect 2 [insert object name here]s and take to [insert some random place]â. Lovely and imaginative, but sadly totally flawed as half the challenges are based around such ropey concepts that youâll be there for hours just trying complete them due to bugs. We spent over half an hour trying to clear 5 limos in the Las Vegas level, only to give up and grind them instead.
On initial load of Hoffmanâs, you could swear it was a PSone game; rather blocky pixellated graphics meet us and weâre already wishing the developers had learnt a bit about the fact that this generation of consoles are pretty damn powerful and can at least render some decent textures. Every texture on every part of every level looks truly awful â“ blurred, low definition â“ just terrible. Iâve never quite seen such bad textures and it brings me back to remembering THPS 1 on the N64. Itâs that bad.
Having said that, character models are lovely; crisp textures, wonderful face details, and as for animation; itâs top class. The tricks look incredibly smooth and are amazing to just watch in replays, with little details such as the trousers rising up above the sock line when the legs are stretched out adding to the realism immensely. Sadly, as we said, the rest of the game looks atrocious. Weâre unsure if this game is meant to look bad with simplistic blocky prefabs, but by my reckoning; itâs a mistake and just looks ridiculously out dated. Thereâs no âdirtyâ look to suit the theme and youâll be praying that the gameplay is at least half decent. The only consolation graphics wise is that neat bloodstains smear across the floor when you fall⦠yay!
So, what about the controls? At the start, they feel OK, but you soon realise that theyâre fatally flawed for a game that relies on lightning fast reactions; theyâre sluggish and unresponsive â“ youâll press the right combination to do a trick and half the time your character wonât respond at all, or just do a totally different move to what was intended. Niggles like this make puling off combos virtually impossible; youâll never be able to do the same combo twice. Some may argue that this is the nature of the sport in real life; it ISNT: if you choose to do a trick, you do that trick â“ fail it or not. Weâre not even going to start on how unresponsive the game is to the manual and nose manual manoeuvres. Just donât encourage us, please.
To add insult to injury, the grind rails and ledges have a very ropey clipping area, meaning that 50% of the time you wonât lock into an intended grind on the rail, even if youâre accurate with your landing. Itâs things like this that totally frustrate you and youâll be spending hours just trying to pull off one combo youâve worked out. It makes us weep to see such a crucial part of the game being so poorly implemented.
Crashing. Youâve got to love it. No, not the rider off his bike, but the game itself. Yep, no joke, this game crashes⦠frequently. And itâs retail code. Mid game, every 30 minutes or so, the screen just fills with some simplistic shapes, the whole machine slows down and itâs virtually impossible to quit out the game. Sorry, but is this a PC game stuck on a GameCube disk?!
Sound wise, weâre met with a nice diverse selection of metal, rock, punk and hip-hop â“ itâs a nice blend and perfectly suits the game. This, sadly, is one of few good things about the game, however, even here thereâs a limited selection and we found that we were reaching for our own CDs rapidly, although the Iggy Pop song âThe Passengerâ in the game is timeless, we swear.
