MXGP2: The Official Motocross Videogame

My first real question going into MXGP2 was the same one I ask about every sports sim: does it work for the casual crowd, or is it laser-focused on the obsessives? After several hours in, the answer is firmly the latter, and the game does not particularly apologize for that. Milestone built this around the 2015 FIM Motocross World Championship license, and if you care about real riders, real tracks, and the actual structure of Grand Prix motocross weekend events, that authenticity is genuinely impressive. Real Events mode drops you into specific historical race scenarios and asks you to recreate the outcome. The Monster Energy Motocross of Nations lets you race for your country. The career mode has you picking teams, courting sponsors, managing emails, and working up from a stock 250cc MX2 bike toward the meatier 450cc MXGP class. The breadth of content is not in question. What is in question is whether any of that content is fun to reach. The control scheme splits bike and rider across both sticks: left stick steers, right stick shifts your rider's weight, and shoulder buttons handle the separate front and rear brakes. That dual-brake setup alone is genuinely novel for the genre, and when it clicks, nailing a corner by shifting your weight into a berm feels satisfying in a way most arcade racers can't replicate. The problem is that the game does a poor job of walking newcomers through any of this. There is no proper tutorial campaign, and several reviewers noted the same thing I noticed: the first hours are an exercise in trial, error, and the occasional inexplicable out-of-bounds reset. Ease the difficulty down and enable the assists and you'll get somewhere. Stay on realistic physics from the jump and the AI will lap you without mercy. The rough edges are hard to ignore. Visually, MXGP2 looks serviceable at best, with track textures that underwhelm and crowd models that are clearly copy-pasted six times and called done. The audio situation is worse: bike sounds are thin and unconvincing, and the in-game music offers almost nothing in the way of atmosphere. The AI behavior on the track has its own issues. On realistic difficulty, rival riders tend to run on fixed lines like a train, with little aggressive passing or genuine racing feel, and the pack rarely breaks apart the way real motocross heats do. The online mode is essentially dead at this point, and it was struggling even around launch. Playing a solo season through career is where the game holds up best, particularly once you unlock faster bikes and start tuning suspension settings and gear ratios, which do make a noticeable difference. For the casual co-op crowd or anyone hoping for a Saturday night couch session: there is no split-screen here, and online is long dead. If your friends want to do bikes together, this is not the platform for it right now. What MXGP2 is, specifically and stubbornly, is a solo sim for people who already care about motocross as a sport and want to engage with its official license, real calendar structure, and granular bike setup options. That audience will get decent mileage out of it. Everyone else will likely bounce off the controls before the first season is over.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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