Dave Mirra BMX Challenge

Punctured

Help... please, somebody help me! Oh God, I really can't do this anymore! I know I should, I know it's the professional thing to do but ooooooh the pain... It burns! Make it stop, please just make it stop! Sob...

What's that you say? The slidy button thing on the right hand side of the PSP? Click. Ahhhh, there we go, that feels better, the nasty game has gone away! Thank you, thank you so much, you have no idea how good that feels! Or at least I hope you don't, because if you do the chances are you've already sat down and played Dave Mirra's BMX Challenge for longer than ten minutes. An agony for which you have both my sympathy and my apologies since this review clearly wasn't in time to save you the torture.

Such is the mess the game arrives on shelves in I'm not even really sure it deserves a nicely structured review in which to describe its failings. After all, it's a game that was clearly never intended to be any good or else was accidentally released before anyone had given it even the most basic play testing. So, in the spirit of things barely finished, I give you a selection of my rough notes to kick things off...

It's slow. Yes, pedal power isn't ever going to be a match for high performance sports cars, but perhaps that's a hint push bikes don't make great subject matter for a racing game.
Races are plagued by twitchy analogue controls that regularly cause you to come to a sudden halt facing ninety degrees in the wrong direction.
The lack of any kind of foot-on-the-floor-skidding means cornering is slow and cumbersome.
Rider AI is laughably bad, when you get close enough to them to force them to stray from the optimum racing line a little they cycle right into obstacles as if blind.
There are only three other riders on the track with you but still they manage to appear and disappear in front of your eyes at times.
Only needing to finish in the top three to progress when there are only four riders to start with isn't a recipe for longevity.
Having tracks that change configuration half way through each race isn't innovative, its rubbish.
Having tracks full of obstacles you can't see till you've either jumped into them or met them head on round a blind corner doesn't count as exciting, again it's rubbish.
Large open plan tracks are all very well but at least ensure you always make it clear what direction you're supposed to be going in.
Poor collision detection that knocks you off your bike for passing too close to an obstacle regardless of if you actually hit it is more than a little annoying.
Tracks that always seem able to end up dull and uninteresting no matter how many creative possibilities the choice of environment seems to offer is actually some kind of an achievement.
Coming to the table with shockingly basic graphics that would have looked out of date on a PS1 isn't acceptable in this day and age.

Considering all of those notes were made in the first half an hour or so, it's probably clear already that there's really no hope of saving BMX Challenge, but you may be surprised to realise I've actually yet to mention its worst feature. It's quite possibly the easiest racing game in the world! I completed all eight tracks as well as the unlockable ninth on both difficulty levels in a little over two hours. As if that wasn't bad enough I managed it almost entirely without the use of a single speed boost. Not because I'm a fancy show-off but simply because the trick system you use to earn boost is so broken it's far less hassle not to bother, thankfully the other riders are so poor you never really need it. The rather large failing in the tricks department doesn't bode well for the one other mode of play included on the UMD, Trick mode.

As its name suggests, Trick mode sees you attempt to earn the most points on each track within a set time limit by performing as many tricks as you can. Despite the horrible controls and limited trick selection it's easy enough to rack up enough points to win without ever really breaking sweat on most of the tracks, although only those striving to find a sense of value for money will ever bother. What would have been nice would have been a way of seeing where you stood in the rankings as you played rather than simply finding out at the end if you've done enough to win. But hey-ho, I'm almost sounding like I care now.

They've actually bothered to include an Ad-hoc multiplayer mode that supports up to four people as well, but to be honest what's the chances of there ever even being two people who own the game in the same room at the same time?

Anyone still reading this has hopefully guessed by now that Dave Mirra BMX Challenge is an abomination of a racing game, not only is it lacking in everything a good racing game needs (a sense of speed, fun tracks, controls that feel right and competitive AI) but it has all been put together with such an obvious lack of care or basic gameplay testing that you wonder why they bothered at all. If you own some kind of miniature coffee cup then the UMD would make an attractive coaster but other than that please please please don't bother.

15%

By Paul Newcombe