Mad Riders Review
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sirdesmond
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Following in the footsteps of games like Pure and ATV Offroad Fury, Mad Riders is a downloadable, off-road ATV racing game developed by Techland, the studio responsible for last year’s Dead Island. Mad Riders is, in many ways, just about as far as you could go from an open-world, first-person zombie game. It is a cut-and-dry, downloadable ATV title featuring racing, trick competitions, arena races and time trials. Many gamers feel that the ATV subgenre was perfected with 2008’s Pure so how does Mad Riders stack up? Here’s a hint: Not well.
The game play here is nothing new. A number of tournaments each with a certain number of events must be played through and unlocked to get to the next tournament. Each tournament includes a number of different game modes: race, race the clock, trick races, ghost trials and arena races. Honestly, all of these modes, with the exception of trick races, are nearly identical. You need to hit checkpoints or cross the finish line in a certain amount of time. Whether that amount of time is conveyed to you as a timer, an NPC racer or an NPC ghost, the game is still essentially the same.
Mad Riders’ one modern feature is the use of a shortcut and recharge system somewhat akin to the trigger system seen in Black Rock Studio’s Split Second. Here, you collect blue tokens throughout the tracks and, at certain specific points, you are then able to spend those tokens to open doorways to shortcuts or recharge boost stations that shifts ramps and change the landscape in a limited capacity allowing you to reach new boost tokens. While this is a fun and interesting addition, I found it problematic mostly because of how little time you have between the prompt appearing, being able to see where the shortcut or recharge station is, activating it and going through the shortcut. This is additionally problematic when you realize that the doorways to the shortcut close after a certain amount of time so hitting a wall or crashing on your way to the shortcut can lose you both the path and the token.
Racing games are all about control, and in this department, Mad Riders does not do particularly well. The basic feel of turning and navigating the track is a bit slippery for my liking, not in a good dune-buggy sort of way either. Like in many racers, boost is a key mechanic to the game. The boost is activated by pressing and holding a button. The problem is the boost doesn’t always activate when you press the button. The ATV needs to be facing forward in relation the screen. If you attempt to boost while turning, the boost will hold off until you are turned mostly forward at which point it will kick in. Also, if the button is being held, the boost will continue to expand while the ATV is in the air without seemingly making you actually fly faster through the air. This leads to missed boost opportunities when you may want to boost your way out of a turn or want to have the boost readied to go off as soon as you hit the ground.
This lack of quality control was coupled with frustrating level design across the game’s list of tracks. Flying through the air after going off a ramp, I would find massive objects in my way that, once hit, would instantly cause me to respawn. Foliage, trees and other objects within the level obscure the track and direction of the path ahead even while on the ground. Hitting the occasional wall or tree wouldn’t be so frustrating if the game didn’t instantly bring up a Mad Riders splash screen and respawn you somewhere nearby on the track. This rampant respawning breaks up the action and makes it better to avoid ramps in most cases than to take your chances with the obstacle-filled jumps.
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.