Not quite a Legend.
Across several console generations dating all the way back to the original PlayStation, we’ve had several Motocross and ATV games that have been anywhere from good to great, but rarely any to really push the needle forward in ways traditional racing games have done over the years, especially recently with the Forza Horizon series. MX vs ATV has been one of the more consistent for the genre and honestly, one of the few to actually maintain a series. While each game has improved in some ways year after year, its latest entry in Legends feels more incremental than revolutionary.
I’ll stress right now that while Legends has the foundation for what could be an enjoyable off-road racing experience, my time with it has been riddled with performance issues to the point where it felt like I was playing something that was in early access or some sort of pre-release beta. Sluggish menus, volume inconsistencies, drastic difficulty spikes in its AI, to so much pop-in that I could open a bottling plant. While I am hopeful much of this is set to be addressed in some sort of day one patch, its current state is disappointing.
When I play a game that has noticeable issues, I examine how much it affects my experience and how much can be shrugged off as I wait for it to be fixed. But every single aspect of this game is over-flowing in technical problems. Despite the simple closed stage menus, every single tab is stuttering or attempting to load vehicle models or textures, and failing each and every time. The character model for your racer and everyone else’s seems to have their animations set anywhere from 1fps to 30 if you’re lucky, while everything else is largely smooth in comparison. Seeing these stiff animations can almost look stop-motion-like, and honestly, it’s been years since I’ve seen this drastic of animation problems this noticeable. When every race started, racers would have these odd two-frame animations while we waited for the GO! to start the race. This was EVERY race.
Browsing the menus in the game to customize your racer or tune your vehicles, as I’ve mentioned before, was sluggish, with weird stuttering as models bounce to get in place for where the camera is to default to. It’s very jarring and is reliably consistent in this issue. Seriously, just load the garage and then back out; it’s painful. Browsing any of the customization options results in waiting for textures and models to load, and trying to browse options as you scroll can be a chore because of the game struggling to load anything. The previous game had all its menus staged outdoors, and this game on newer hardware can’t even do it in an enclosed space. While there are nice details like your jacket reacting to the wind, everything else about your character feels incredibly dated, especially the ragdoll effects that feel ripped out of any of this series’ previous games.
Now, apart from the technical issues, Legends is a lot of the same as what we previously had in 2018’s MX vs ATV: All Out. There are some changes to the physics and the weight of each of your vehicle types, but more or less, this feels very similar to previous entries, especially as this is the first of the series to take advantage of the new consoles. However, for as much as my Series X is telling me that this title has been optimized for it, I don’t know exactly where. And considering the SSD drive in the Series X is incredibly fast, the load times in Legends to load up a single race is somewhere around 35-45 seconds on average with the initial load into the game being almost a minute long. And, speaking of waiting, crashing can result in inconsistent times before your racer will reset and the manual reset button is a multi-second long process of holding down the button.
While some locations are spacious and offer a nice sense of scale with a solid draw distance and some rather impressive lighting, there is still excessive pop-in that is everywhere. This varies from fans in the crowd, vegetation, and shadows, to entire mountainsides as I am racing up them. There is a noticeable visual jump in how good some locations look when compared to All Out, but it’s not “four years later and running on newer hardware” better. If this game was running on the Series X in backwards compatibility mode, I’d believe you.
Now, all that said, is MX vs ATV Legends fun? Yes, but that does come with a few caveats. The budget price is certainly one of them, and while the MX and ATV components of the game are decent enough, the UTV addition here is the weakest part of the package by far, so much that if it wasn’t included, I’d look more favorable at what is here. While there are parts of All Out that I found more fun, not to mention its presentation is far and away better, the large checkpoint races here are super fun, and honestly, I prefer them far away more than any of the stadium races, but this comes down mostly to the game’s AI being wildly inconsistent.
At first, I started the game on normal, and for the first few races, it was fine. Then suddenly, they would out distance me to the point of nothing I did would keep me in contention. I would make sure my bike was tricked out and ready, but the next race? I would destroy them. I went back to the previous races on the easiest difficulty and somehow they were even more ruthless than before, it made no sense. I would load up one of the easiest courses on the hardest difficulty and they would collide into one another and barely put up a challenge and it was during one of these attempts that I even lapped them. While I kept most of the attempts on normal for the better part of my time with Legends, it still fluctuated greatly in whatever the AI decided to do that race.
Legends offers up what you’d expect from another entry in the series; a Career mode where you’ll unlock more events and sponsorships as you collect fans and earn rewards such as new outfits, new bikes, parts, and more. Then there are the exhibition races to simply jump into an event, to both online and split-screen multiplayer. There is also the all-new Trails mode which sets you free on its massive courses through a series of checkpoint races. While the career mode has you taking part in several Trails maps, simply jumping into this mode is where I ended up having way more fun than anything else the game had on offer. The same can be said for its freeride mode that simply places you in its open-world locations to drive around to your heart’s content.
As you earn fans, you’ll unlock more of the Career mode and honestly, you’ll need to really dive into each vehicle type to earn enough fans to really see that mode through. This is where my time with the game faltered considerably. The MX and ATV components to the game are fine, sometimes even great, but the UTV is where I simply had to stop interacting with anything falling under that banner. The UTV feels so astonishingly weightless and just driving it around is an exercise in frustration. It felt like I was maneuvering around a balloon that would get caught on anything and everything as I attempted to smash through my opponents and never once felt the weight of doing so. While having variety is a crucial pillar to a title like this, it felt like the UTV was added in to showcase new content but lacks the work to make it fun.
While I still feel that the ATV should feel a bit more weighty when on the ground, especially after spending over 20 years of my youth riding them, I found their use in the more open courses to be damn fun, whereas I am less sold on how they handle when taking on the lap-based arenas. This is also the case with the MX bikes, although I am not too crazy about the new “refined” physics when compared to previous games. Still, while the UTV vehicles are largely a write-off, both the MX and ATV sections of this game, especially when taking on the checkpoint races, are pretty fun, if a bit basic.
Before you see any action on an MX course, the game spits you out into an open world to drive around and explore. You’ll have a few tutorials to dig into, teaching you the fundamentals, but oddly, are focused on the MX part of the game, and while there is some sharing in controls across each vehicle type, it’s an odd exclusion nonetheless. It’s here where you’ll have NPCs to talk to and earn your rewards, races to take on, and collectibles to discover. You’ll have career progress blocked until you chat with a few career-focused characters, and this will have you biking all over to engage in a few lines of dialogue. The character models are bland, their mouths don’t move when they talk, and every single interaction with them had me almost shoving my bike right up their nose to even have the dialogue prompt pop up. I think the idea of having these characters is fine enough, but the execution here just doesn’t cut it.
Legends has an odd assortment of music ranging from punk, rock, and screamo metal that while the former does fit in with the energy of a race, the screaming metal lyrics as you’re simply out for a free ride made me mute the game’s music entirely, especially as some tracks I heard 3-4 times a row. I would say that in my entire time with Legends, I maybe heard five or six songs at most. I also had weird moments where the volume would increase as I drove up a hill and then lower as I descended. The music is also not leveled out to the same volume as some tracks were far louder than others. Overall, this is a fantastic podcast game.
MX vs ATV Legends has a good foundation for what it is aiming for, but its execution is ok at best with a wealth of technical problems that just indicate a complete lack of polish. Rider’s Republic gave me a fun and interesting open-world to tear down a mountain on a variety of fun and engaging gameplay styles, and I was really hopeful that Legends would give me that same rush. There is some promise here with its Trails mode and the world given to you, but there is very little here that All Out hasn’t already given us. The budget price of $40CAD does make it more enticing as it’s just a fraction more than All Out is currently, but isn’t a strong enough entry to entice anyone who wasn’t already going to snag this up. Legends is a small improvement in some cases but just not worthy of the name.
Developer - Rainbow Studios. Publisher - THQ Nordic. Released - June 28th, 2022. Available On - Xbox One, Series X/S, PlayStation 4/5, Microsoft Windows. Rated - (E) Mild Lyrics. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.