MXGP PRO: The Official Motocross Videogame

MXGP PRO is a dirt-circuit racing sim from Milestone built around the official 2017 MXGP World Championship season. You get 19 real-world tracks spanning Qatar to Indonesia, 60 licensed riders, and manufacturer bikes from Honda, Husqvarna, Kawasaki, KTM, Suzuki, TM Racing and Yamaha across the MX2 and MXGP classes. That roster looks great on paper, though the two classes do blur together a bit once you're actually riding - the bikes sound and handle more similarly than their spec sheets suggest. The headline addition here is the reworked Pro Physics engine, developed with input from real MXGP athletes including Tony Cairoli and Tim Gajser. On track, that translates to a system where rider weight management is constantly in play: you shift body position through jumps, scrub corners to preserve speed, and pick race lines through ruts that physically deform across laps. It's the kind of game where perfecting one tricky hairpin feels genuinely satisfying, not just faster. New players can lean on a rewind feature and a suite of 30 tutorial challenges in the Compound, a roughly one-square-kilometre practice area, to get their bearings before toggling any of the assists off. The adjustable bike setup system - tuning suspension, brakes and throttle mapping against real MXGP metrics - adds another layer for the dedicated sim crowd without being shoved in your face if you just want to race. There is a real ceiling to pop through here, but the tools to get there are the most accessible the series has offered. Where MXGP PRO trips over itself is everywhere outside the core riding. Career mode is a flat structure: start in MX2, chase sponsor contracts, climb to the MXGP class. The Extreme Career variant locks out assists and rewinds for higher fame rewards and an exclusive livery, which is a nice touch for the hardcore crowd, but neither mode has much narrative meat on it. Rival reactions amount to emoji responses in the standings, and there are no meaningful consequences to anything you do off-bike. The modes that exist outside career - Grand Prix, Time Attack, quick races - cover the basics without doing anything exciting with them. The MXoN team-race mode from earlier entries is gone, which hurts replay variety. Online multiplayer does its job: 19 tracks, quick match and player-hosted custom lobbies where the host controls physics, race length and collision rules. That flexibility is genuinely welcome. But if you were hoping to pile four people onto the same PC with a handful of controllers, forget it - there is no split-screen at all. As someone who judges a racing game partly on whether it survives a Saturday night with friends, that is a hard fact to overlook. MXGP PRO is a game for one person at a time, ideally someone who already cares about the sport or is hungry for a dirt-bike sim with a real learning curve. Bottom line: if you have a gamepad and patience, the riding in MXGP PRO is the best in the series at this point. The physics feel earned, the track deformation is visible and satisfying, and the Compound gives you room to actually improve. Just go in knowing the rest of the package is functional rather than exciting, and that Milestone's annual release cadence means the game shares a lot of DNA with its stablemates. Solo sim fans who love motocross will find plenty to chip away at. Casual groups or anyone chasing an exciting career mode should look elsewhere.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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