MX Nitro Review - A Competitor to Trials

MX Nitro is the first console released game by world renowned MiniClip and it involves stunts, skills and complete mastery, but does their realisation of the world of Motocross make the cut?

The game kicks off with a pretty straightforward tutorial which runs you through some of the basic controls and skills you'll need to come out on top. The idea behind MX Nitro is to compete in leagues throughout the country and once you've completed the tutorial, you'll need to defeat the leader to qualify to compete in the Junior Championship.

Each event you compete within is split into track cards. These include track quests and completing these quests will earn you a star which helps to define your progress and unlock further competitions.

Most events you accept will comprise of racing your way to the finishing line, but this is Motocross we're talking about and as such, tricks are a big part of the game. Freestyle events emphasise this gloriously as the goal here is to perform as many death defying stunts within the time limit possible, where as standard, the highest score wins. As a note, although the idea here is to have fun, I feel that the bikes themselves don’t actually have much weight to them on the control/handling front.

One of the games features are Gear Packs. These allow you to gain new skills and give you in-game currency to spend on new kit, such as trousers and helmets, new bikes to help further your career and other such goodies. Bikes you own can be upgraded and there are a number of new ones available for purchase also.

I feel that with a genre almost exclusively dominated by the Trials series, it’s refreshing to see another game step up to the challenge, but as fun as it's been to play, I've found there are several things which sadly hold it back.

One of which is the overly challenging AI. I’m all for difficult AI, but the whole point of winning races in career mode is to advance, so the fact the AI always seems to be quicker and one step ahead of you, or so perfect that it almost never makes a mistake seems a little unfair. When I began I actually couldn’t achieve first place on the very first initial freestyle event, simply because the AI was next to impossible to beat. No matter how hard I tried, the AI score almost always seemed to be above my own.

When it comes down to it, though, I enjoyed my time with MX Nitro as although extremely difficult at times, the races were very fun to play. In my opinion, though, if you're looking for something easy to pick up and play, then I definitely recommend this title. If you're a Trials fan, you'll have some fun, but there's definitely more to be desired here, though if we ever see a sequel to this fun little gem, I can definitely see Miniclip making the necessary improvements for MX Nitro to become a very strong contender within the genre.

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