REVIEW – With Milestone’s games, I regularly bring up the fact that they don’t seem to improve much (if any) over time, or that they don’t do more than the bare minimum with their games. The Italians kept this approach, but there may be a glimmer of hope…

Let me start by pointing out that they finally ditched their old engine with MXGP3 and decided to change to Unreal Engine 4. It immediately makes a significant difference over 2, which I may have skipped last year… but that’s in the past now.

Career

My immediate thought after booting the game was „are we seriously going through THIS SHIT again?!”: the creation of your rider, and you can forget seeing his face throughout MXGP3, as he will stay under a helmet all the time. Enter Again Fuck This Game!, who got the same customization things for the fifteenth time. Then I chose my sponsor and bike (two and four strokes are both available – the former one is a new addition). Then a debut season followed with 2×2 races (or more, depending on your settings) and the ability to level up my rider. Four categories: throttle management, control, braking, and rain ability – you’ll see most of these level up each race if you are successful. With your success, you get credits, and you can get more than usual with better sponsors, a harder difficulty, longer races, disabling rewinds, more realistic physics, and manual gearbox usage.

What can you buy with your credits? You can customize your rider (helmet, goggles, neck brace, boots), or your bike. You can even upgrade your bike by replacing the tire, the suspension, the brake discs, and the exhaust, or even buy new bikes.

Physics

The physics are alright – I like how the Unreal Engine 4 brings up a significant change by the track surface deforming in real-time, which means your track usage will be seen the next lap. As usual, you can change how realistic do you want your physics.

Beginners can also win after a few test laps (which can be used on the Compound track). I think the game does its job well here, and I also need to mention the online here. Up to twelve players can participate even in a championship, expanding the game’s life. Too bad MXGP3 uses peer-to-peer…

What I didn’t like

As I don’t want to write more pages than usual (I’ll do that with MotoGP… lol, don’t you worry), let’s get through this portion. I don’t think the frame rate is stable. It can be an annoyance, and it can destroy races online. If you bail, you will still teleport on your bike out of nowhere. If you go off track by just a slight margin (by landing on the edge of the start straight after a jump), you will be reset to the track. It can look ridiculous after finishing the race and intentionally jumping towards out of bounds: during the slo-mo finish animation, you will disappear and show up out of nowhere (then disappear just as it ends). Victory animations? Zero.

Podium celebrations? Zero. Tutorials are dealt with in just menu standstills (wow…?). If you finish the first race, the game loads the track AGAIN. Unbelievable. Also, the loading times didn’t feel short either. The background music is there, but I disliked it, and the same can be said about the bikes’ sounds – oh, and you cannot turn their volume lower than fifty percent! Thanks, Milestone… and you can also forget about split screen racing as well. Lol…

Also

There are a few other modes. Time Attack, Grand Prix, and Championship are all self-explanatory. Compound – you can drive around on your test track to check your settings, for example. (Congratulations on making this a separate mode out of the career mode!)

There’s also the MXoN: choose your track (allows five out of 18 total I think?), your nation (three-rider teams!), and the team with the least points wins. The higher your position, the fewer points you get. (1st place = 1 point, etc.)

Only for fans!

The reason why I gave the game a six is that it does the job what it was supposed to do, but the audiovisuals are terrible. The career mode is not inspiring me to play it. Online, if you can get a full pack, MXGP3 can be fun, and you can consider my rating a 7 and not a 6. Don’t buy this game full priced, though. Content-wise, MXGP3 is extremely Spartan, to say the least.

-V-

Publisher: Milestone S.r.l, Intergrow

Developer: Milestone S.r.l

Genre: Driving/Racing, Simulation

Release date: May 30, 2017