Monster Energy Supercross 25 X Monster Jam™ Showdown - Dirt Master Edition

I've spent enough Saturday nights trying to get friends into racing games to know the difference between "fun after five minutes" and "fun after five hours of practice" - and Monster Energy Supercross lands firmly in the second camp, for better and worse. Milestone built this first entry in the series on Unreal Engine 4, and the results are genuinely impressive visually: riders' gear looks grimy and detailed, stadiums feel alive, and the sense of speed in the arena sections is real. The game covers the full 2017 Monster Energy Supercross season with 17 officially licensed tracks including Daytona, plus real 250SX East and West championship riders alongside the 450SX roster. On the gameplay side, this is not a pick-up-and-play racer. Supercross as a discipline is about weight positioning, jump timing, throttle control, and scrubbing speed over crests rather than just going flat-out. The game models all of that with enough fidelity to reward the patient, but the learning curve is steep and there is no proper tutorial to speak of - you get thrown into your first career race with a control diagram on screen and a wish of good luck. Veterans of the MXGP series will adapt faster; total newcomers may find the bike twitching out from under them repeatedly in the first hour. A rewind feature is available, which helps, and difficulty settings can ease the AI aggression, but the fundamentals still take real time to click. Career mode has you creating a rider and working up through the 250SX East or West class before graduating to the 450SX, earning credits to unlock gear and bikes along the way - it works, but it is shallow by modern sports game standards, and dedicated players will hit its ceiling without feeling they have fully inhabited a Supercross life. The track editor is the genuine standout. Eight stadiums to choose from, a toolkit of whoops, jumps, 180-degree berms, bridges, and straight sections, and an online sharing system that at launch already had thousands of community tracks to download. You build a layout, validate it, upload it, and anyone can race it. For the kind of player who loves tinkering and then watching others suffer through their creations, this mode alone extends the game's lifespan considerably. Deformable track surfaces are also a nice touch - the dirt changes consistency when wet, which shifts the handling model and rewards adapting your line mid-race rather than following the same groove every lap. Now, the honest negatives. Load times are long. The AI on default settings is aggressive enough to feel punishing rather than competitive. Online multiplayer supports up to 12 riders, but server reliability at launch was a known sore spot, and with this being the first game in a series now several entries deep, the online population on PC is thin. There is no split-screen on the PC version, which is a meaningful omission for couch co-op nights. Controller support is solid for a gamepad - a standard dual-stick layout handles weight shifting and braking on separate inputs cleanly enough - but force-feedback wheel setups have limited benefit here since this is a bike sim, not a car racer. For the same reason, HOTAS would theoretically be the ideal input but is not a supported configuration out of the box. Stick to a gamepad and you will be fine. If you are a genuine AMA Supercross follower who wants to race the 2017 roster on officially scanned tracks and build your own stadiums, this delivers that specific thing competently. Milestone has since released multiple sequels that each improved on the physics and career depth, so if you are coming in fresh to the series in 2025, the later entries are meaningfully better packages. This first game is a time capsule with a 67 Metacritic score that reflects exactly what it is: a solid but unpolished foundation that proved the series was worth building. Riley, Scout Team

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