Publisher: BaKno Games
Price: $9.99 (£6.99)
Description: A Side-Scrolling Motorbike Platformer
Fullscreen Support |
Mouse Support |
File Size |
Launch Date |
Required Specifications |
Yes |
All (Keyboard Control)/h3> |
99.3 MB——- |
29th November
|
None |
Rating
Pros: Tricky but addicting, precise controls, ragdoll physics after death, tons of online levels.
Cons: Difficulty spikes.
Review
Motorbike fulfils every boy’s dream of becoming a skilled and daring trials biker, facing deadly obstacles and challenging jumps. Thankfully, this virtual sport doesn’t require the many months of training and exercise to become a professional in real life. Just a bit of stern dedication and a lot of time. It runs amok with it’s the adrenaline-pumping gameplay that just brings you back for more and more.
Motorbike is a 2.5D skill-based platformer where you take the muddied seat of a Trails bike and take on a huge selection of challenging tracks. Levels covered in logs, half-pipes, triggers, mines, rollers, crushers, boxes, ladders and lots and lots of ramps. If you’re the sort of person who’d throw their Macbook/iMac out a window if you get too frustrated, then definitely don’t buy Motorbike. You will save having to replace your computer.
Motorbike is very hard. Some manoeuvres seem almost impossible whereas others feel like they have been placed there with the sole purpose of rubbing you up the wrong way… with sand paper. There are no checkpoints in any of the levels, and even though they are small, they still manage to pack in a lot of track meaning you will be retrying and retrying till you get a clean run through. But this is what I love about Motorbike. Once you complete that track you’ve been kicking yourself over for the past week, it feels so great and the sense of progression and achievement is overwhelming. Almost as if you are a real biker who had just made that impossible leap.
And this satisfaction is none the more appreciated as a result of the responsive controls. The arrow keys do a splendid jobs of communicating exactly what you want to happen in the game. Messing up is no more the computer’s fault than it is your own, and no matter how hard you fail, the urge to keep trying is overwhelming. It helps that when you do fall of your bike, your poor character gets flung across the screen in the ol’ ragdoll-y fashion landing in all manner of uncomfortable places.
On top of the many levels included in the game, you also have the option to create your own and access others created by those kindly online folk. I would just like to point out now that the level select screen is to be found in the Settings screen. I spent almost the whole time playing Motorbike using the Editor to load a track and then play it, leaving me wanting more from the menu and level select system. In fact, I wrote a whole other review expressing my displeasure with the user interface, and it was only when the developer pointed me to the Settings menu that I realised playing other levels didn’t have to be so painful.
The in-built level editor is very comprehensive and gives you free reign over what obstacles you want to include, the shape of the landscape and the starting position of the player. You can start anew or find a track online which you can edit to your liking. The 800 user-generated tracks are guaranteed to keep you busy for a long time. Plus, you can trust the tortuous online community to deal out some excruciatingly difficult maps. Thanks guys.
Online tracks are ranked out of 5 to give you an indication of its quality, as well as a little check box to let you know if you have already played this track or not. It’s very well done.
To sum up, it’s crazy fun flipping over bombs and catapulting across chasms, and the controls are spot on. The core gameplay is solid and challenging and the huge amounts of content available will keep you addicted for hours on end.
