Monster Energy Supercross- The Official Videogame 4 is the fourth installment in the Supercross series. Supercross 4 is a racing simulator where I learned that physics are important. The series is, of course, developed and published by series creator Milestone S.r.l. They have a long history and a love of racing that is apparent in how they make these types of games. Supercross 4’s physics-based controls have made this game not only challenging but definitely a learning experience.
Off to a rough start
Coming into Supercross 4 I was not sure what to expect. I’ve played games like GTA that have motorcycles in them but the controls and physics aren’t like in Supercross. The only other experience I had with a motorcycle-based racing game was Excitebike 64. But the physics in MESTOV4 game threw me for a loop. It was very unexpected that I would have to shift my rider in the game to adjust for jumps and cornering. I gave my rider a $32k injury my very first race.
Controls and Career
Supercross does a great job of breaking down the importance of shifting the weight and making adjustments to the bike before the race. I never used to think of things like this in terms of racing. I learned that I had to throw my rider over a jump by leaning back then forward. In the racing games I’m used to, you normally just press X.
The career was rather interesting as it is the way to build your character. Through career mode, I earned skill points that I could use to increase my skills such as cornering. Like many games with a career mode, I love that Supercross 4 lets the player perform at least one training before taking on a career race.
The career mode was also really interesting as I could choose to set the option to do only certain races or if I wanted the full career you can race in all the qualifying races. At points, I really just wanted to ride around on the bike to get a feel for the controls. Luckily Supercross 4 has a cool training compound to ride around and explore. The compound is pretty big and had a lot of the humps and jumps I had problems with when racing. If the compound is not your thing you can make your own track to ride around on and share. I haven’t messed around with the track editor yet but I will once I’m able to test it efficiently.
Even though I have not played around with the track editor yet, I do love that I can upload whatever monstrosity of a track I make and share it with everyone. Milestone gets major points for having dedicated servers for multiplayer racing. I did not have to worry about a player ping-ponging through a race because of lag bumping and knocking players over because you can turn collision on.
Not quite bad
Milestone has been making these games for a while so it is pretty solid in its design. I know Supercross 4 is about the racing, not the characters. I get why there is a character creator and it’s so players can make their own character to take through career mode. The problem though is that there is no satisfying looking character to be made. I’m not sure when we as players would ever see the characters head without the helmet during a race, but I would be okay if we just never saw the head. The racing part of the game, great. The bike customization, great. The character creator not so much, but I get it as how the character looks underneath pales in importance to the actual mechanics of the game.
Now the character creator is not a big problem compared to the intro tutorial. Upon starting the game it kicks off with a tutorial race. I liked that the tutorial tells you the controls and where to use them. The unfortunate part is that, as a new player, I did not find that it adequately prepared me for racing as I did not succeed at grasping jumping, or getting past the little humps without losing speed. I didn’t quite get at the time exactly how much the rider positioning mattered. I wasn’t sure should I lean forward, backward, or rock back and forth. A lot of the actual learning of learning the controls came after the tutorial by messing around at the training compound and youtube videos.
Crossing the finish line
Overall Monster Energy Supercross 4 is a fun racing game once you are able to grasp the controls. As a new player, there is a bit of a learning curve. I love that the career mode is extensive and allows players to really live out a career through all the qualifiers if they choose. I can’t say again how much the controls surprised me and for all the crashing I did, I enjoyed and am still enjoying learning how to properly control this bike. If you are interested Monster Energy Supercross 4 is out now for $59.99 on Playstation, Xbox, PC, and Stadia.
This review was completed with a code from PR.
