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MotoGP 07

The Warm-up Lap

It's fair to say, even at this earlier stage in the review, that MotoGP 07 is nothing more than a tweaked, polished and poked version of the last two releases. The same racing modes remain (Quick race, Championship mode, Extreme mode and Time trials), as does the rider seeding and ability points system. Some tweaks have taken place though: to access Extreme Mode, one must complete a full Championship, which itself has been split into two means of play. If you fancy being Casey Stoner or, for a laugh, Kenny Roberts Jnr, then there's the standard Championship mode which gives you access to all of the riders and their bikes.

However, if you fancy yourself as a budding Vermeulen then you need to start a Racing Career, a new feature to the MotoGP games. When I first heard of this, it was like Christmas had come early - I was under the impression that you'd start off as a lowly newbie, trailing at the back whilst learning the tracks, bikes and skills; finishing the season well would earn you a better ride in the following year. Well, it's a bit like that but it's spoilt by the fact that as you progress through a season and your seeding becomes better, more bikes become available, offering greater levels of grip, speed and acceleration. However, one can change bike, design, names, etc at any point in during the year.

The best Extreme mode bikes cost a lot of money!

The Extreme racing tracks tend to be much wider and easier than the official MotoGP ones.

The Racing Career mode is further marred by the fact that to improve your ranking, you're forced to start off at the lower levels (Rookie or Pro) of difficulty - which means you'll be winning races so easily, there's no challenge. Of course, you could start off at the Champion level but you need the best bikes to get anywhere in the races, and they only become available at certain seed ranks. *Sigh*

A miserable qualifying

Another thing I've had against the MotoGP series since version 3 is the Extreme mode - well, not the mode itself but how it's linked to the real racing. Any rider ability points you gain in these arcade frenzies carry through to MotoGP races; in other words, to be the best rider, you need to compete in both parts of the game. This feels so fake and unrealistic that it almost ruins the game; there's no need to combine them, as by themselves, the Racing Career and Extreme Mode are both fun to play but they're also very different in approach.

Extreme Mode is all about riding bikes that look vaguely road-going, at ludicrous speeds and angles around equally ludicrous tracks. It's a complete blast to play, especially once you've got a top-notch bike underneath you; the sense of break-neck motion and impending death is conveyed well. Cash earned from race wins can be poured back into your racing, by purchasing a broad range of upgrades (such as lightweight wheels and fairings, to different pistons and cams) or a whole new bike. It's almost good enough to be a separate game by itself... almost.

Everyone leans like their 125cc nutters...

You can twiddle with your bike's settings as much as you like but you'll invariably use the same setup for every track.

While the Extreme Mode was been given a thorough updating, the core MotoGP racing hasn't. The developers are, of course, limited to what they can do, given that the actual racing series isn't that much different to last year either (other than the change in engine size from 990cc to 800cc) but the changes to the arcade zooming around only serve to highlight just how shallow and weak the Championship and Racing Career modes are. For example, one can alter the swingarm, wheels, brakes, pistons, cams, and so on in Extreme mode, as well as the actual bike setup. But for the supposed "pinnacle of realism," all you get for your MotoGP races are tyres, suspension, gearing and wheelbase; for most of the difficulty levels, one can stick to a single setup for every track.

In Extreme mode, you can purchase all kinds of upgrades for your bikes.

Everything from pistons, cams, carbs, swingarms, wheels - you name it, you can replace it.

Climax Studios and THQ have so much potential with this franchise and the Racing Career mode is just crying out for greater depth. They've tried in some places (such as the basic track telemetry, which charts out your relative performance in different sectors of the track) but most of it is just a token effort; the actual "sim level," a value between 0 and 100%, just alters how much grip off-track material has and how well the automatic gears work. Another vaunted feature, fishtailing, where the rear of the bike squirms around under heavy braking and acceleration, looks great but is nothing more than a visual dainty - it's not as if you can back into a corner sideways. Tyres have some level of temperature vs. grip modelling but no degradation system, so to differentiate between the different types, soft tyres have lots of grip but slow you down (with hard tyres being the opposite). Slow you down?

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Gameplay and FeaturesPage 3: Racing and multiplayerPage 4: Graphics and HardwarePage 5: Final thoughts & Scores

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