The racing genre of videogames is something that has been ever changing and encompassed every single vehicle known to man. On the Xbox 360 there are already plenty of quality racing titles with multiple more on the way soon but something there is not are many off-road racing games. There has been Dirt but for that Xbox 360 owner who is into ATVs or MX racing bikes the pot is completely empty, until now. Thankfully it’s not being done by some newbies to the topic on hand, developers Rainbow Studios have been making motocross games for a long time (ten plus years) and now the MX series is on the next-gen consoles. It comes under the name MX vs. ATV: Untamed but at it’s core it is more of what every fan of the MX series wants, more off-road bike racing. Everything in Untamed is not perfect, not even good, but at the end of the day the game does enough right to make it an easy purchase for fans of the type of game that it is; others should probably check out the demo before a full purchase is made.
Racing games are often plagued by never changing core features and MX vs. ATV: Untamed continues the unfortunate trend. Many of the gameplay mechanics in Untamed can be traced back to some of the early MX games on the PS2 or maybe even earlier. While this can be a bad thing for Rainbow Studios the good far outweighs any bad and it’s nice to see their first next-gen entry in the series flesh out well. Untamed teeters on the line between simulation and arcade style racing and does it to perfection. For an off-road bike racing game the style of control can make or break the game; too realistic and it fails, too arcadey and it fails as well. MX vs. ATV on the 360 plays fantastically and there are few things we would change about the overall control scheme. There is also a good balance between the different types of machines players can drive in the game, which keeps the ATVs or MXs from being obsolete in multiplayer games. Speaking of vehicles there are plenty in Untamed to keep every type of off-road gamer happy as well as the ones that are interesting enough to pull in new gamers to the series.
Something that the developers did change is the modes and types of races that can be played in MX vs. ATV: Untamed. There is of course the obvious single-player campaign mode that allows players to work their way through the ranks and become the number one racer in the world. New modes include endocross, opencross, and x-cross. The first mode (endocross) is basically a race through a normal supercross track, with the addition of every type of obstacle imaginable. This addition ends up hurting the mode in the end because it is just too freaking crowded on the track, causing it to be unbearable to race for the average gamer. Opencross is similar without the obstacles and the x-cross mode is just an upside-down tournament with unlockable tracks, riders, etc. As far as the single player racing is concerned Untamed does a decent job with giving gamers enough to keep busy but it can, at times, become a tad too repetitive and can start to feel more like a chore than a good time.
