Milestone S.r.l, king of the bike games, are back with another entry in their series based on the Monster Energy Supercross series. Honestly, if you liked the last one you’ll be hard pressed to find anything to complain about here but new fans to the series might find the hurdles too high to jump.
Monster Energy Supercross – The Official Videogame 2
Developer: Milestone S.r.l.
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
If you’ve seen a bike game on a shelf there’s a good chance Milestone S.r.l. had something to do with it with franchises like MotoGP and MXGP out there. Now they’re adding Monster Energy Supercross to their repertoire with the succinctly titled Monster Energy Supercross – The Official Videogame 2. To start things off you can expect some pretty standard modes such as single event, time attack, career and championship. If you’ve played any racing game in your life you know what to expect from these modes since they all offer races at just various lengths, it’s the career mode that has a bit more to offer but it’s not much.
In career mode, you pick a region to race in and go at it across various tracks in the hopes of coming out on top at the end of it all. The gimmick here however is that each week you have a “calendar” to assign activities to that you can do before the big race at the end of the week. You can’t just assign an activity on each day however so you have to decide how you want to focus your week. There are some pretty mundane activities like doing a press day that offer XP bonuses or currency rewards, then there are the challenges and training days.
Performing a challenge will pit you against a pro-racer you’ve developed a “rivalry” with during your races in either a 1-on-1 race or a time attack. I suppose the main attraction here is getting to, in a way, race against your favorite racer but I wasn’t too enthusiastic about this activity. Training days incorporate a sort of RPG element to the game by giving you various stats like landing or turning, offering up training challenges related to that stat, and giving you a bonus to said stat if you’re able to complete the task.
These training missions ended up being more frustrating than helpful however since it always starts you already driving at full speed towards a curve and you pretty much have a second to get your bearings in time, else you run the risk of crashing off course. This of course doesn’t help when going off course disqualifies you from that training attempt and you only get five tries. Add on top of this that some parts of the track will immediately kick you instead of giving you the usual 3 seconds to return to the track and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a mode you’ll likely end up skipping.
Now Milestone S.r.l. are known for the sim aspects to their games and that doesn’t change with Monster Energy Supercross 2. I’m personally more of a bigger fan of car sims than bike ones, but I’m not one to shy away from them on occasion since it just takes me a hot minute to get into the groove of things. I never really got into the groove of things here however. The game introduces a pretty piss poor tutorial on how to play the game that doesn’t really go into very much detail on the minutia of how the game mechanics actually work. You’re never told when to use the clutch or the best way to come at a curve or jump. If you’ve played a recent racing game you’ve likely seen flowlines in them that help visually show you how to tackle a turn. Monster Energy Supercross 2 oddly enough features these but only on jumps and even then it’s only telling you the distance your jump will be but only if you hit that ramp at a certain speed it doesn’t bother to divulge. It’s especially frustrating because I want to get better at the game but it doesn’t offer the tools to do so. As I played and eventually learned the ropes it felt more from just beating my head against a wall instead of actually earning it.
The game also features the now industry standard rewind feature and it feels stupidly useful here. There’s no limit use or cooldown to the rewind which means you can pretty much use it as much as you want and you can bet your ass that’s exactly what I did. Anytime you flub a jump or oversteer on a curve there’s nothing stopping you from hitting that rewind and fixing your mistake. You pretty much become a god with it and you start to feel a bit bad for the AI players because of it.
A lot of the issues with last year’s game was that it was rife with bugs and technical issues and when I previewed the game last year there were definitely a few bugs and frame-rate issues I encountered but those seem to have been ironed out since then. I’m going to assume multiplayer maybe works because each time I hopped online to start a lobby not a single person joined. The races here tend to feel a bit hollow as well, in that you don’t really feel the energy or thrill of the race. As someone who went to an actual race the other year, part of the appeal was the enthusiasm of the announcers giving a rundown of the race and cracking jokes; there was absolutely none of that here besides the brief intro and outro to a race which left the actual races feeling oddly silent. There’s also a track editor if you’re into those sort of things. It’s okay at best and could be a lot better, but it’s hard to get too excited when you’re deciding between plopping down “big mud ramp” and “slightly less big mud ramp”.
Character customization is back in case you didn’t want to play as one of the dozens of pro-racers. You’re pretty limited in how you can make the face of your actual character, but there is a plethora of outfits and helmets to choose from. The only problem is that they all more or less look the same. I did have a lot of fun putting “MR. SATAN” in bold purple impact font on my racer’s jersey though. Where the customization (sort of) shines is with the bike. As you play through the game earning currency you’ll be able to buy a pretty sizable variety of parts for practically every inch of your bike and change the individual colors for them as well. Adding to the mild RPG elements I previously mentioned, there are even some parts like exhaust pipes you can buy that will actually increase the stats for your bike. Now I say it sort of shines because again, the game is limited to being based on real world bikes and honestly most of these handlebars look the exact fucking same with just the slightest variation. The only parts I ever invested in were the stat boosting ones since my custom bike didn’t really end up looking any different from the base one.
The Final Word
Monster Energy Supercross 2 is a hard game to sell. On one hand there’s a very clear passion for the product on display here and supercross fans are likely to spend hours perfecting every curve and jump on these tracks. On the other hand, the game offers no helping hand to newcomers and the tracks all start to feel sort of “samey” since they’re all just mud tracks in what might as well be the same arena. Even as someone who got to go see an actual supercross race, the game just didn’t grab me like the real thing did, but this is a product that’s 100% not made for me. Honestly, you probably already knew whether or not you were going to love this game before you even read this review.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 3 out of 5 – Average
