Mad Riders Review

A frustrating and entirely uninspired addition to the ATV racing genre

Posted by Christian Sorrell on May 30, 2012 - 10:01am EST

Multiplayer in Mad Riders is a bit unusual, although it works on a basic level. While playing single player, a notification will appear at certain moments on the side of the screen letting the player know that multiplayer is available. Hitting the prompt will warn you that you will lose your current progress in the race you are currently in and will be dumped into the multiplayer menu. It is an odd system, especially considering it doesn’t save the state of your single player race or tell you specifically when users on your friends list are playing multiplayer. It honestly feels as if the developers understand that there may not be very many people playing this game online at any given time and it will be helpful to prompt players when someone else is looking to play online.

That unusual system aside, once I was able to find an online match it worked well enough. I raced against other humans over an internet connection. The problems arose when I noticed that I had joined other racers who had already been racing each other for a number of tracks. This led to their scores carried over between tracks to be in the high 80s while my score was in the 10s or 20s. I would never be able to catch up. This continued seemingly as long as we all wanted to play, with a new track and game mode popping up soon after one track concluded.

I was never prompted with a choice to vote on a game type or select my preferred track or any of that. New races came up, we raced, points were awarded to players based on rank, the next track started and so on and so for until I forcibly quit out of the multiplayer. A system similar to Trials Evolution in which a number of tracks are selected and played through then awarding an overall winner at the end is able to be set up if you host your own custom match, but it is my understanding that individuals could still join halfway through the competition, encountering the same problem I did.

The game features two separate leveling systems, one for single player and one for multiplayer. In singleplayer, rising in level unlocks new ATVS, new paint jobs, new rider skins and even new tricks. While the unlockable ATVs are fairly straightforward with better stats than the previous ATVs, the rider skins come in a wide variety including things like skeletons, mummies, ninjas and more. These costumes were one of the few things that helped give the game some flavor while also reminding me of past extreme sports titles like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that used to embrace the wacky. From what I could tell the multiplayer leveling system seemed to be tied mostly to achievements and online rankings but due to the fact that I was not able to play a massive amount of the multiplayer prior to the game’s launch, there could be more to it.

Mad Riders is an entirely uninspired title. While it cribs a feature or two from more modern titles, it ultimately feels like a game that came out of the era of the original Xbox in terms of music, overall presentation and game play. Lackluster controls lacking any real weight coupled with troublesome level design which consistently places a wide array of impassable objects and vision-obscuring foliage make for an extremely frustrating experience. Just a few races in and I had already had enough but forced myself to keep playing for the sake of this review. Your time and money would be better spent running to the local game store and picking up a copy of Pure or even Nail’d, another ATV racer from Techland. In the trailer for Mad Riders, it promised an “awesome arcade game for the price of a pizza.” Honestly, I think you’d be better off going with the pizza.