David Scarborough

Can Milestone bring its sim racing expertise over to the world of motocross? Find out in our MUD review.

Motocross should be cool. It’s high-octane, dangerous and it demands a considerable amount of skill from its drivers. It’s the perfect fodder for videogames, a congruent blend of style and substance that could line-up among the racing genre greats.

But where Forza or DiRT have careened down radically different paths to their success, MUD never quite manages to gain a similarly strong grasp on its central conceit to effectively provide much in the way of thrills.

It’s too po-faced to be considered arcade, too flimsy with physics to be anything approaching a sim; MUD finds itself in a strange no man’s land of dithering focus.

To begin with, the handling only inspires indifference, the bikes so encumbered by the slightest bump in the track that it truly does feel like you’re battling through thick lumps of the brown stuff with every turn and hump in the track.

Yet launch off a ramp and you’ll oddly find a lithe machine that’ll twist and turn unnaturally before landing with a jerky thud – it’s an alarming disparity that can be, initially at least, disorientating.

A midair trick will provide a quick boost but inside the standard races found in Championship and World Tour Mode (the latter the game’s anaemic take on career mode) there’s no other need for such extravagance.

Flair is reserved for MUD’s Tricks mode (or Monster Energy Drink Trick Battle - groan), where certain button combinations pull-off a series of acrobatic manoeuvres to hit a designated score.

It’s one of the better additions to the event roster but it’s decidedly half-baked; the tricks requiring little to no skill and you can break the mode by simply performing front and backflips repeatedly until the timer hits zero. 

But breaking this side mode is of little consequence when you’ll have seen all the game has to offer after only playing a few of the event stages within World Tour.

Here Trick events are clearly the highlight, but you’ll find Elimination adding a touch of tension and Checkpoint injecting some energy into the stilted formula, but it’s not enough to rescue MUD from its flabby handling, confused outlook and crushing banality.

It’s unfortunate that the game seems more concerned with hawking energy drinks than actually refining its gameplay, but rather handily these cans of neon-coloured compressed energy serve as something of an appropriate analogy for MUD: a short kick of adrenaline that leaves a regrettable sour taste in the mouth.