JiggyJay's Full Review: Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX 2 for PlayStation 2
Rainbow Studios has made two failures in my eyes: ATC Off-Road Fury and Splashdown so when I first heard that they were going to be taking over the Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX franchise, I was going to skip the game. I liked the first Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX game for PSone, but I read mixed accounts of how the game acted. Some people said it sucked, while others said it was awesome and I didn’t know what to do until I earned a free video game release at a rental place. There was nothing there that I wanted, so I just grabbed Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX 2 and took it home and played it, but didn’t like it at first. In fact, I wrote a review for it shortly after my Wakeboarding Unleashed Featuring Shaun Murray that was very negative towards it, but after I picked it up for the final time until I returned it, I started to like it, so out popped this review and hopefully you will enjoy the review no matter how crappy it’s written.
I’ve been a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, big fan of Activision’s O2 series, which is a arc that has a crap load of extreme sports games in it like Wakeboarding, Skateboarding, Biking, and even Snowboarding and attached to these games are major stars of the sport. Like with skateboarding, it’s called “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” and with surfing it’s called “Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer”. The whole series is fantastic and I’ve played almost all of them with my favorite being the Tony Hawk games. Biking games have been pretty horrible these last couple of years. There’s been the horrendous Dave Mirra games and then there’s been the recent crap with the name of BMXXX, so the sport has been crapped on constantly in the video game world.
But Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX really puts some new elements in the stagnant genre. You still have the basic goals for each level like collecting things like hotdogs and gas cans and stuff like that and you still have to achieve a specific high score and stuff like that to advance to the next level. These goals are tedious at times and are pointless. Most of them are repetitive tasks, but some are original goals, but that doesn’t distract from all of the crappy goals. You also have the terrible time limit, which I hate now that I’ve played Shaun Murray’s Pro Wakeboarder and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, but there are some new things that no other games in the series have. In the fashion of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, you have to find new gear and bikes and stuff in each level, but instead of finding stat points (to enhance your speed, hang time, balance, and stuff), when you find new gear and bikes your stats go up. Another thing that’s really new is that you can find new tracks to add to the soundtrack. There are a couple CDs hidden in each level and when you find them they add songs to the soundtrack and when I first saw this I was totally excited to keep playing since it was a great idea.
The theme of the game is a road trip. See, the game revolves around Mat Hoffman and his friends touring the country biking and doing all that good stuff. You have a map of the places you need to go and you get road trip points every time you finish goals and when you do this than you can go to the next level and there’s a whole variety of levels. You can go to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, and Chicago and many more. These levels are pretty nice, but they aren’t at all as big as the level designs in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 and Shaun Murray’s Pro Wakeboarder. They aren’t that big at all. Sure, you can find secrets that make the level bigger (like hidden areas), but that’s about it. The ramps are cool, but the grinding rails are just lacking. The level design is just bland and repetitive. In some levels some grinding rails are set in the same kind of fashion so that they look exactly like some in the previous level. The areas are still fun to ride in, but they just are rip offs of past Activision games.
In Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX 2, you can pick from many different riders like the regulars Mat Hoffman, Rick Thorne, Mike Escamilla, and Simon Tabron, but you also have some new ones like Ruben Alcantara, Seth Kimbrough, and Nate Weasel and there are also riders that you can unlock by finding them in secret areas and ask them to join your crew. And in case you are wondering, there is a level editor so that you can create your own levels to ride in, but there is no create-a-rider. You can only edit your current rider and nothing else so I was disappointed in that sense. You also have a cool feature that’s called the “Scrapbook”. This feature is totally off the hook and fun to mess around with. In each level there cameras floating around right by ramps and rails and stuff and when you bust a trick off a ramp and hit the camera, it takes a snapshot of your trick and after the time limit runs out, you can edit the picture by moving the camera angle or zooming it in and out and if you like it you can put it in your scrapbook or throw it in the garbage. It adds some replay value to the game.
Like in the first game, when you unlock a new level and select it, you get a little video of Mat Hoffman’s real life tour. Some of these are fun to watch like the one where the crew is trying to figure out how to hook up their PS2 in their RV in the middle of a highway and you can unlock more. Each rider has a lot of videos that you can watch but you have to unlock them first, some more replay value is added. In every game that’s in the O2 line, Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX 2 has a soundtrack with actual bands and stuff in it that people will know. In the last game, there was even some Pennywise, so of course I was excited to see what this soundtrack would offer and I’m happy with it. In the soundtrack, you have some kicking tunes by Bad Brains, Suicidal Tendencies, and even an LL Cool J song (one that I actually like for a change), but you also have some terrible songs by artists like Crazy Town, Dub Pistols, and Swollen Members, which are rotten tracks. The sound effects, though, are pretty good with great grinding sounds (sounds more crisp than what the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Neversoft team puts together) and nice ramp and wheel sound effects and falls are especially fun to listen to.
When Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX came out on the PSone, I had already been playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 and the first one so I was used to those games and their controls, so when I started playing it I started so suck and the same thing happened with the sequel. When I first picked up Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX, the controls were so sinister towards me that I quit in frustration multiple times, but once you get used to it (which will take three days tops), then you churn out tricks simply. The camera angles can also be gruesome because when you go on a half-pipe and ride up in and get major air than the camera darts directly behind you look up and it sucks and will sometimes lead to your fall, but this happens on rare occasions. The controls themselves are pretty easy, but they might confuse some. When you jump off of a curb, you can’t do a 180 or something as you do it. You have to press an L button and then a direction. And in Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX, there aren’t any Spine Transfers or Reverts, but when you end a trick you can still go into a manual to link the tricks. Speaking of manuals, they are harder to do. You have to bunny hop first and then press up and down to do an manual instead of being on the ground and pressing the buttons so it’s inconvenient for me, but something that did get taken over from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 is the flatland tricks system. You can do a lot of flatland tricks and make a ton of points with flatland combos and they are more realistic and are funner to watch,
The tricks themselves are pretty cool. When you do a certain amount of tricks (ranging from the Candybar to a Superman to even a Backflip) then your Adrenaline Meter gently fills up and when it turns green then you are allowed to do a special trick and these are cool to watch. Each rider has different specials and all of them are cool to watch. The grinds are easy to pull out, but there’s something that might be wrong with them. When you’re doing a manual or a grind or a lip trick, you have a balance meter which goes up to down and you have to press the directional buttons (or use the analog stick, which I usually use) to keep balanced and I think the meter is all messed up. The physics of the meter are all screwed up. I can stay balanced with my first crappy bike for five minutes or longer without falling and that’s just not right. It’s a cool thing because you can earn a lot of points, but Rainbow Studios really messed it up. What haven’t I talked about yet? The graphics. The graphics are pretty nice…but don’t really compare to other games in the O2 series. The skies look cool and beautiful as well as some of the water graphics, but what’s really going on is that the game looks like it was made at the same time as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. It has the same identical look of that game and wasn’t that game made a year or two ago or something. The graphics are still modestly good with the grinding effects being the best. I still get giddy when I see the sparks flying when I’m grinding. I notice some slowdown every time a lot is going on onscreen, but never anywhere else. The graphics move at a fluid, great FPS and even though they are a little outdated, they still get the job done. A thing that is good about the graphics is that when you do a trick it can either be regular, sloppy, or perfect with perfect being the best. In the Tony Hawk games, if you do a sloppy, your trick doesn’t look sloppy, but when you do a sloppy trick in this game, the wheels of your bike get all wiry and you can tell that it was a sloppy trick that you just did (I hope that made sense…).
Closing Statements
The game is good, I can give it that. Although there are some blemishes, I still recommend it for a rental, but not a buy. In the short week I had the game, I played it off and on and still got most of the secrets, unlocked all of the levels, and achieved as many goals as I could and I felt that it was no fun anymore so that I wouldn’t buy it. The game is really fun to play and will captivate you for a week, but I can’t imagine buying it because it’s so short. There’s no demo inside of Tony Hawk’s Underground (the next Tony Hawk game, which I am so ready to preorder online) and the multiplayer features are sort of lacking, but it’s still really fun to play and the scrapbook feature might squeeze some hours out of it, but if you want a really good, almost perfect game that will swallow you up and never let go, go out and buy Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 since that’s one of the best extreme sports games ever made. Thanks for reading, but my final advice to you is just for you to give the game a try since it should be played, just not bought.
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