Monster Energy Supercross: The Official Videogame

Monster Energy Supercross: The Official Videogame is a helluva long title so let’s refer to it as MES going forward. Software publishers love sports games and why not? It’s basically the same product every year. Update the rosters, optimize the game a bit more, and maybe throw in a couple of extra features. Game publishing is a business like any other but the luxury of leveraging off of an existing game is not one often afforded to them. But even in sports games, the cycle of repetition is finite, as tech keeps moving forward. New hardware platforms are released and game engines must be heavil...

A solid first entry in the series. If you’re a Supercross fan then you’ll easily get knee deep into the excellent track editor and have good fun hurtling around its muddy tracks.

Supercross 4 is as big of an improvement that we’ve gotten in the genre for a while, but that’s not saying much. A good amount of content and some new ideas round things out nicely, though.

Monster Energy Supercross does a lot of things to impress then, but its lacklustre career mode takes a lot of shine out of the proceedings. If you’re a fan of the sport you’ll find a lot here to like, what with its worthy selection of real world tracks and bikes. And mechanically, it plays rather well too. I’m just not sure how much you’ll get out of the title before it no longer excites, despite the presence of a track editor and countless customisation items to unlock. It’s undoubtedly the best Supercross game I’ve ever played, but it still falls short of real greatness.

Monster Energy Supercross is a game that took me by surprise only a month ago. It was then that I previewed it at a hands-on event in Milan at Milestone S.r.L's headquarters. There's always a difficulty in having previewed a game. What can you say that you haven't already covered? Is there anything new to cover? Has the game changed much at all? These are all major considerations.

When I first previewed Monster Energy Supercross many months ago, I thought it was a fun racing game with a lot of potential. I still think it’s fun, but this first run at the license from Milestone doesn’t come anywhere close to meeting its real potential.

Republished on Wednesday 27th November 2019: We're bringing this review back from the archives following the announcement of December's PlayStation Plus lineup. The original text follows.

The music in Supercross is forgettable. The soundtrack is primarily made up of ambient rock music that comes off as more generic than anything. The sound effects are realistic, and the voice acting (by the previously mentioned commentator) is good enough. The volume levels are odd though, as music will become very quiet at times for seemingly no reason.