#MX UNLEASHED PC PS2 PORT FREE#
While you start with only one or two tracks in each of the different course styles, there are well over 70 tracks available by playing through the Championship and other modes, such as Racing, Freestyle, Free Ride, "Challenges," and User Tracks. ATV Unleashed truly shines in, is the number of tracks, and the number of unlockable items. This is enough where an average player won't experience a song twice in a single playthrough, but it can get repetitive over time. The game's soundtrack is a modest 20 songs, consisting primarily of rock, with a few hip-hop tunes making up the balance. However, you won't hear the sounds of vehicles breaking as they crash and fail to burn, or any environmental noises. Simple grunts define the sounds your racer makes when crashing, engine noise is functional but limited (you cannot hear your engine at all when in the air), and varied whumps and other crash and landing-related noises match their corresponding events reasonably well. The game's audio is limited, but effective. The courses themselves are static, except for the paper cut-out fans that fill the stands in some courses. Unfortunately, there were precious few crash animations, which cause the crashes, an aspect which one might find rather morbidly entertaining, to become boring very quickly.
Animations are fairly smooth, with a few barely noticeable jerks when, for example, your character crashes.
#MX UNLEASHED PC PS2 PORT FULL#
The head's-up display is a reasonable balance of "don't overload the player's mind" and "offer the player a full array of relevant information," presenting times, places, lap numbers, times, current speed, a mini-map of the course, and score, if applicable, in a semi-transparent, non-obtrusive form. Visually, Unleashed isn't going to win any awards, but the graphics are perfectly functional.
These modes are sufficiently aggravating as to drag down the entire game. For example, Sand Rails bounce all over the stage in an annoying yet somehow entertaining fashion, while the slightest object will send a Trophy Truck flying off course, flipping the car and putting you seven or eight seconds behind the computer AI, who can pull everything off with a low chance of screwing up. While the two namesake vehicles handle solidly and realistically – you can lean into a corner before you even land from the preceding jump on a motorcycle, but ATVs can knock motorcycles right off the road and don't crash if they hit the safety blocks that are in many areas of the course – almost every other vehicle has severe handling issues that minimize their enjoyability. Unfortunately, what is there rapidly degenerates into the greatest problem of the game. Once you have the basics figured out, there really isn't that much to each of the different vehicles or play styles, with the exception of Hill Climb races, where the exceptionally steep and short nature encourages careful mastery of the physics engine. If you crash, your vehicle and character fly and skid, then you are simply "teleported" back onto the course in an immobile state. Once you're on one of the many tracks, it's simply a matter of accelerating, braking depending on the vehicle you choose, choking the engine if it stalls on you, and perhaps throwing in a few tricks to get more points for unlocking stuff. In Championship mode, the vehicles are selected for you, and if unlocked, the motocross option allows you to specify the vehicle's engine class. Select the vehicles used – including pitting all of the game's vehicles against each other if you wish – and the specifics of your rider and vehicle's appearance. With practically all of the vehicles, the game is the same, at least in the simplest sense. However, this seems to exaggerate the effect to the point of ruining playability in the name of authentic styling. Part of the fun of this title is its similarity to actual dirt racing, where cars, bikes, and other racing implements need to be very skillfully driven, or they will go off course, off direction, and off the ground. Unleashed gets some things right, and to some extent, I might be spoiled by the smoother physics of other games I have played in the racing genre. The end effect is a title that drops itself from "awesome" to "okay" in fairly short order. The PC port feels excellent however, the game suffers critically from feature creep to the extreme, with the onslaught of apparently new features causing no single new feature to be excellently implemented. ATV Unleashed is the fourth game in THQ's MX series, and the first to get a PC iteration.