MXGP 24: The Official Game

My first hour with MXGP 24 was spent genuinely excited: the full 2024 championship roster is here, 20 real-world tracks, over 50 MX1 and MX2 riders including Jorge Prado, Jeffrey Herlings, and Kay de Wolf, and factory teams from Red Bull KTM to Monster Energy Yamaha. On paper, that is the motocross package I have been waiting years for. Then I hit the actual racing, and the excitement drained out faster than a deflating front tyre. The handling is the core problem. Controls feel off from the jump, and the physics never deliver the weight and momentum that make dirt-bike racing feel physical and satisfying. Riding off-track triggers an instant teleport back onto the course, which kills any sense of consequence for mistakes. The AI sits somewhere between passive and baffling: opponents bumble around like they forgot there was a race happening, and the aggression that defines real MXGP competition is almost entirely absent. Terrain deformation, a feature the developers promoted heavily before launch, lands with a quiet thud rather than any meaningful impact on race conditions. Mode-wise, you get quick race, time attack, a Free Ride open area (small and sparse), a season mode, and the headline career. Career tries to dress itself up with simulated social media, a currency system for entering Grand Prix events, and Perk Points for bike bonuses. It is a reasonable framework, but the layers feel thin and the management depth does not come close to what the WRC series managed at a similar stage. Online is the roughest corner of the package: multiplayer options are limited, lobby populations are sparse, and daily challenge leaderboards have been essentially empty for months. If your buying decision hinges on competitive online play, walk away now. For the accessibility-focused crowd or the casual "Saturday night motorsport session" crowd, the news is not much better. There is no proper tutorial, no audio commentary, no victory animations, and the menus are a generic slog with uninspired music. The first-person camera does work well and scrub animations have been praised by a small subset of the community as a genuine positive, but those are narrow bright spots in an otherwise undernourished release. This was always meant to be the first entry in a multi-year licensed series running to 2028, and it reads like a foundation laid too quickly. Bottom line: if you are a diehard MXGP fan starved for anything with the official licence and real rider names, there is a functional, if bare-bones, championship experience hiding in here. Everyone else, including casual fans hoping for an approachable dirt-bike game and online players wanting populated lobbies, will bounce off this hard. Wait for a steep discount, or check whether the annual follow-up irons out the basics first.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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