Mad Riders – Left Me Wanting More

Mad Riders is an off-road ATV racer brought to us by Ubisoft for download on PSN, upon loading the game I was initially pretty excited to play something new and take on some interesting tracks and pull off some insane tricks. However what i got was a generic racer that had me wanting to put the controller down after just a few hours of play. There are few modes to compete in, Quick Race, Tournament, and Multiplayer. As I always do i jumped right into the career mode to test my meddle against what should be the games deepest and most enthralling mode. Tournament is lacking the diversity needed to make this game an overall enjoyable experience, its broken down into 10-12 segments with 5-6 races each. Some of the races are time trials, some are full races involving 9 other racers, and others are an arena style races where u criss cross a large circular area going from checkpoint to checkpoint reminding me more of the stupid American Gladiators event where they would get into giant cylinders and go from station to station then an off-road race.

Multiplayer was a sloppy experience, whenever joining a quick online game I encountered issues that made the process more annoying the exhilarating. The server would either immediately drop you from a lobby or allow you to join only to be booted right after a match. The mode itself had some decent ideas allowing players to participate in series style races just like the tournament mode but since I was booted from the server each time before we got to the end of a series it felt as if their good ideas were for not.

Controls are ok, I would stop just short of calling them solid or tight but they function well enough to not ruin the experience. The level design however is a different story all together, with mysterious boundaries and repetitive level designs players will only need 1 or 2 runs on a course to understand all the ins and outs and secret shortcuts. Even though you switch locations you never feel as if you’ve gone anywhere or seen anything new, the developer tried to mask this by throwing in a huge statue here, a puddle of water there but it becomes glaringly obvious that they threw different textures and backgrounds around a few very generic tracks and tried to call them “different”

With games like MX vs ATV available for download on PSN for $14.99 I could not respect myself for telling our readers they should download this title for $9.99, spend the extra 5 bucks and get yourself a much deeper title with real variety. Mad Riders could have used more time in level design, because with more variety and a tighter online experience this could have been a very enjoyable game. As it is it comes off as rushed and lazily put together… Mad Riders, you left me wanting more.