REVIEW – This year, it’s not only the PS4 that gets MotoGP, but also the Xbox One too. Milestone has released this year’s adaptation of the Grand Prix motorcycle racing, with a full grid on all three categories. On top of these, I can’t really say many more positives…

 

I’m going to mention MototGP 14 and RIDE, because these are the direct comparisons by Milestone. I can already point out something: compared to the horrible loading times of RIDE, MotoGP 15 is loading fairly quickly. The first impression quickly went into an accident, because I see the same thing from a year before. Or two years.

You’ll get presets to create your rider again, and he will never ever going to blink. And then, the tutorial comes and again, it’s a voice that will always inform you what does what, whenever you visit a menu for the first time. No changes whatsoever on this front.

More for our money?

I find it a great idea that we can get to ride some classic, two-stroke bikes in MotoGP 15, where we have to complete a lot of challenges – mainly consisting of win the race -, but pray tell, why do these bikes sound like the audio was recorded with a cassette player? This destroys the ambience. Also, there are a few imaginary tasks here, because Garry McCoy definitely didn’t ride the Losail track on a 2001 Yamaha, especially because the track didn’t even exist yet. You can get some XP here.

Gaining levels, but it’s not an RPG

There’s a reason to gain levels. Sure, you can unlock images and videos after reaching certain levels – I still find these kind of unlocks absolutely pointless -, but also, a few riders as well. If you want to get everyone, you’re forced to ride until reaching level 70, that is when you will get everything unlocked. Higher difficulty levels give you better XP, this is how the game would try to inspire you to turn the difficulty up. Five difficulty levels await: very easy, easy, medium, hard and simulation. If you have played the two aforementioned Milestone games, you can immediately skip the first one.

Career

The career mode is almost the same as 14’s. Sure, but you can *gasp* ride in private teams! Tuning bikes? You can do that too, but compared to RIDE, it’s absolutely dumbed down. So if you pick a private team, you have to gain credits by winning races and passing the expectations, so you can buy bikes yourself. Tuning bikes can be achieved by data packs. Chassis, suspension, brakes and engine (no engine tuning in Moto2, that is the same for everyone in that category), and every aspect can be tuned by three levels.

Some things need 2 or 3 data packs to jump a level. You can usually get one data pack per race weekend, and on testings (which is just a glorified beat the time), you can get three. After every three races, the question will pop up: will you stay in your current team, or change the sponsorship or go for a different team? This is how I switched teams from Moto3 to Moto2 and then to MotoGP… during the season. Let’s get into the negatives then.

A ton of questions…

So, why don’t I get credits, if I change categories mid-season, and I still finished second in Moto3? It’s a cruel move to those who want to get up to MotoGP as fast as possible (you can literally win MotoGP in your second season – I skipped the first six races, yet I could win in the end…). Why do the data packs get uninstalled from my bike, if I installed before starting the race and I restart the race after an accident?

Why can I drive through the advertisement boards next to the tracks? Why is the menu system so limited and still lacking interactivity (because the “touchscreen” has two websites and no interactivity at all)? Moto3 has two female riders, why can’t they get different textures? Okay, I hold myself back for now.

Beginners can win too

As usual, you can set up riding aids easily, as well as the rules and the difficulty level, so you might even be able to shortcut a few circuits here and there (if you don’t get instantly teleported back to the corner), you can turn off the damage and the tire wear too. You can set up the rewinds too, but these are short timed, so try not to bail a lot. With some practice, you can get the victory on Normal against the full grid. So now, you might even race against 33 other drivers on track. A taste of success for everyone, thankfully the game didn’t change this either.

There are other game modes too: beat the time is self-explanitory, Instant Race generates a rider and a track duo, Grand Prix is another self-explanitory mode and Championship is the same as your career, but it’s not tied to your created rider.

Old hat

The game still looks like it was made in 2006. Sure, MotoGP 15 is a cross-gen title, but don’t tell me that’s why the track environments are ugly, while the riders and their bikes look alright! This gives an unexplainable mixture in visuals, which seems to be the deal with every single game Milestone have put out since the first WRC game they did in 2010. The textures and background track elements still load in front of us, sometimes it happens even in your garage too, making it an ugly sight. (It’s alright, your celebrating team crew and your mechanics also look really ugly too.)

The sounds still sound terrible. Is the devs’ budget this low that they can’t record the bikes properly? Am I playing Drone Simulator 2015? Music? There are a few, but noticably less than in previous games, I counted like two or three, and only in menus, because during races, you get nothing again. (Better load something on your PS4, before launching the game…)

Menu system: there was a very unlucky player to encounter a weird bug: nothing loaded up except the Instant Race, not even the Options were available to him. There would be a video of that here, but it got removed from YouTube. If Milestone issued a takedown, it’s a bad move on their side. There’s going to be other glitches anyway, like this interesting one from last year’s game:

Aside from this, the menu system is again, the same old thing, I think even Evolution GT had this a decade ago. In career mode, we only stand in one spot again, so no walking around this year either. The game is really feeling minimalistic on this front… again. Podium celebration? Forget about it. Let me point out that F1 2015 will have that, because at least Codemasters are trying to improve, unlike Milestone, who are either not able to or just DON’T WANT TO improve. Let me tell you that they usually end up throwing out one, or zero patches to their game on PC and that’s it. Awful customer support.

But there’s more: the game feels inexplicably easy. Sometimes, the AI took corners ridiculously slow – perhaps this is because of more riders on the track, and because of that, they are a bit dumber this year. Also, if I bail, I still magically teleport back onto my bike. It’s arcadey, my rider can’t be injured… okay, I admit, I exaggerate.

Pay

There’s also online, which is okay yet again, it feels a bit more stable, until the leaderboards glitch up, because it will happen eventually and Milestone won’t fix it. Also, there’s split-screen, which is a good addition. Sadly, what I expected, also happened: there are Day 1 DLCs. Milestone joined the popular – and in my opinion, game industry-hurting – trend of releasing paid content on release day. You have to pay even more than expected, I’ll get back to it a bit later.

So there’s the free Moto2 and Moto3 DLC, so career mode doesn’t have these teams locked like in previous titles. There’s also the 4 Strokes Champions and Events, which gives you 20 riders, 13 teams, 7 manufacturers and 18 challenges from the 2004-2006 timeframe. But paying fifteen or so dollars for this? Are they serious? Okay, the 90’s 2 Strokes thing is there for free (although they typoed: they say it’s between 1994 and 2001, yet there are 92 and 93 bikes and riders), so you can ride as Mick Doohan, Kevin Scwhantz, Wayne Rainey et al. And also, there’s a… Season Pass for this game. Is Milestone bleeding money this hard?

Don’t pay… that much

This game costs 70, let me rephrase that, SEVENTY dollars on PS4 boxed. I’d only pay 15 at best for this, and even then, I am generous. MotoGP 15 is almost the exactly same thing as 14, because despite 15 having the 14 riders and teams included, Milestone wasn’t able to somehow implement it into the career mode.

Instead, you will ride the 2015 season over and over and over again, losing out on some potential. More content, yes, but you have to pay for half of that. Graphics wise, the rider-bike duo looks better (you can still fall through trackside advertisements), but the environments still look ugly, the sounds are still weak, there is no story (they could have made something like 2001’s Toca Race Driver), the AI is mostly stupid, the career mode is boring, you can’t tune your bikes as detailed as seen in RIDE and overall, the game feels tired to me in general. And slow, because 30 frames. Project CARS has 60. No excuses, Milestone. None.

Online, the taste of success for everyone and the inclusion of classical bikes/2014 bikes/teams are the positive aspects. For negatives, I wrote a lot of that. If the game looks like this on PS3, I can’t even begin to imagine how it can look on PS3… and no, not even the PC version looks decent. I’m serious, take these 70 dollars and buy a used PS2 and Tourist Trophy or hell, ANY OTHER MOTOGP GAMES FROM THAT ERA, because you’d have much more of a quality experience with those games.

Milestone already lost the SBK license. They also lost the WRC license (WRC5 has a different developers, instead the Italian dev team is working on a Sebastian Loeb game… can’t wait, lol…), and if they keep this up, they will lose the MotoGP license as well. Buy it for 20 dollars/euros maximum. This applies to fans to. Get RIDE instead, but pray your saves won’t glitch…

-V-

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Publisher: Milestone

Developer: Milestone

Genres: bike racing

Megjelenés: June 24, 2015