MXGP 2021 - The Official Motocross Videogame

I want to be straight with you: I went into MXGP 2021 half-expecting it to be one of those annual re-skins you load up, sigh at, and shelve. What I got was more nuanced than that, and the 85 percent positive rating on Steam with over 1,200 votes tells a similar story. This is a simcade that earns its place as the best official motocross game currently on PC, even if it earns that crown mostly by default and by polishing an already decent base rather than by doing anything bold. On the track, the fundamentals are strong. Cornering demands patience: nail your entry speed, shift your rider weight at the right moment, and the bike rewards you with a fluid, satisfying exit. Rush it, and you are eating dirt. That loop of learning a circuit's berms and bumps, getting quicker lap by lap, is genuinely compelling. Milestone built the physics around two distinct modes - a forgiving standard setting for players who just want to ride, and an advanced simulation layer that makes every throttle input feel consequential. Assists like auto-transmission and rider weight distribution can be toggled in the open Playground area (set in a Welsh countryside map with castle ruins and off-road terrain) before you commit them to your career setup, which is a sensible design choice. The career itself starts you in MX2 with over 40 licensed riders across MXGP and MX2 categories, and you work contracts and sponsors upward toward the main class. Four Legacy Tracks from earlier seasons (Ottobiano, Ernee, Leon, Agueda) add bonus challenges for extra credits and XP, which keeps things from feeling like a pure seasonal retread. Mode variety is genuinely decent for a niche racing title. You get Career, Time Attack, Grand Prix, Championship (build your own series up to 20 events), a Playground free-roam, an online multiplayer with dedicated servers, a Race Director mode for hosting events, and a Track Editor with four landscape types and community sharing. Crucially for the couch crowd, two-player split-screen made it into this entry, which the previous Milestone motocross games were sorely missing. Two friends, one screen, actual mud-slinging side-by-side racing: that is a legitimate bullet point and it works. Online multiplayer also runs on dedicated servers, which largely solved the lag issues that hurt the 2020 release at launch. Here is where I have to be honest about the rough edges, though, because they are real. The AI is inconsistent in mid-range difficulty: either you gap the whole field out of corner one, or the leader builds an unassailable lead while the pack behind you is oddly passive. There is no ranked matchmaking online. The career's upgrade system buries meaningful bike tuning inside sub-menu layers, and the depth does not come close to what Milestone's own MotoGP series offers in terms of R and D trees and team management. Veteran MXGP players have flagged persistent physics quirks - air-to-land handling that can feel unpredictable, and speed wobbles that seem random rather than physics-driven. The 2-stroke sound design in particular drew some heat from real-world riders in the community. Post-launch patches did add missing tracks (Lacapelle-Marival, Mantova) and custom camera options, which is worth noting if you picked this up around launch and had a rougher time. If you have never touched an MXGP game before, this is the version to start with: adjustable difficulty, a rewind function to paper over early mistakes, and enough content across modes and track types to keep you busy well past a single career season. If you already own MXGP 2020 and are mainly a solo player, the upgrade case is thin. For dirt-bike fans who want to race a friend from the sofa, or who follow the real FIM Motocross World Championship and care about the licensed roster, the case is much stronger.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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