Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX

Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX, a game made by the company Runecraft, known for games like Spec Ops, Scrabble, Barbie and Ceasar’s Palace. Activision was the publisher.

One of the things that immediately catches your attention in this game is the similarity to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, this is because the game uses the same engine as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, albeit an edited version. Unfortunately the game feels like a cheap port from the consoles, way worse than Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, which felt a bit like a port but still played smoothly.

In singleplayer the player has to collect covers of magazines by completing certain tasks which differ little each stage, they’re pretty much the same as in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. You have to collect the characters T-R-I-C-K, similar to the S-K-A-T-E in THPS. Other objectives always involve beating a certain highscores, doing a trick at a specific location and destroy a certain amount of things within the time-limit (like 5 lamps). This is of course talking about the Career mode, in which you can unlock new parts for your bike, characters and courses. There’s also a single session mode, a free mode and a map editor for the player that likes to play singleplayer.

Multiplayer features Horse, which can be done co-op on the same computer, in this mode the players have to set a trick and try to get the highest amount of points, if they fail at this they’re given a letter, if all letters create a word the player loses. There´s also a network game mode which I couldn’t test, since either there were no players or the servers are down, since Runecraft has gone bankrupt.

The gameplay in this game is pretty bad, when you’re playing you’ll easily fall. The game also misses a lot of things that made THPS fun to play, like a balance meter when grinding and such, it now only appears when doing a manual. The game also has the tendency to have serious framedrops at random moments. The controls also feel a bit unresponsive at times, making the game hard in an unfair way, especially when compared to THPS where switching between tricks goes amazingly quick. Another thing I missed is the ability to set your own special moves, in this game you have to guess how to pull one off.

The graphics are very bad in this game, they’re nothing compared to THPS3 which was released in the same year and has the same engine. The levels feel empty and dead, there are no people walking around, nothing is moving, you’re the only one that moves in a static environment. The models are all boring and stale, even the bikes aren’t that well done which have textures sticking out of them and weird tires.

The sound in this game is pretty boring and dull, nearly all songs on the playlist are done by unknown artists and all those songs are pretty generic. In THPS3, you did have an amazing soundtrack which was carefully picked to fit the game, it’s a letdown that Runecraft didn’t put as much effort in this game like the creators of THPS3 did with theirs. As far as sound effects go, they aren’t that bad.

I don’t think this game is worth a purchase, due to it’s crappy gameplay, poor graphics and mediocre sounds. If you do want an extreme sports game or something similar to this, I can really suggest THPS3 instead of this one. I think that if you do buy this game, you’ll end up only playing a couple of hours and then throw in the back of your cabinet only to collect dust.