MX vs ATV Reflex

Description

For more than a decade now, Rainbow Studios has been knee-deep in offroad and motocross racing in various forms. Starting with Motocross Madness back on the PC, the studio has delivered some sort of offroad racer almost every year since then, and I've played most of them. I can remember reading previews for Motocross Madness 2 back in the day and how there was talk of you being able to break your bones and needing to pay for hospital bills after a racing event. It was going to be awesome and force you to change the way you played the game.

That feature didn't make it into the sequel. Instead, Motocross Madness 2 added better visuals, more courses (including a track editor) and refined controls. It was definitely an improvement, but in terms of the actual gameplay, it was an evolutionary step, not a revolutionary one. That same sort of pattern has been happening year-in, year-out since then. More vehicle types have joined the fray, multiple console generations have allowed for substantially better graphics, and more processing power has allowed for better physics (and in turn, better controls). But by and large, we've been playing the same sort of thing for years, and while Rainbow has it pretty much down to a science by now, MX vs. ATV Reflex really is just more of the same.