MX VS ATV ALL OUT!
You won’t believe what you’re seeing
You’re undoubtedly looking at the screenshot and the score and thinking ‘this looks fine – what’s wrong? Well, many things, but the greatest is how the game runs on a standard PS4. At times, MX Vs ATV All Out! is in flicker-book territory. It’s better on PS4 Pro, but Pro isn’t marketed as making the difference between a game being playable and not. We’re not talking about a few lapses in framerate for robot-eyed people to moan about, we’re talking about performance so low, you can count the frames ticking by in the worst moments – and the splitscreen two-player made me feel physically unwell to play. But let’s put that issue to one side. The game itself is predictable, but reasonably ambitious. There’s an openworld hub area, championship race events on MX tracks, various classes of ATVs, UTVs, and bikes, and you can race them on stadium circuits, outdoor MX tracks, and openworld checkpoint courses.
Many elements feel unfinished. Water doesn’t react to vehicles driving through it yet the ground does, and flimsy barriers provide no resistance as you slide through them, because they have literally no collision detection. That means you can cut corners by driving tighter than the visible track limits. When you fall, the ragdoll rider convulses on the ground. At other times, you’ll bang into a rock or tree and somehow stay upright.
The racing is a total mess thanks to far too many cars on the track, too-high AI difficulty, bizarre race durations (one oval is so short the entire threelap debacle is over in about 45 seconds), physics objects that disappear and reset themselves a few seconds after being dislodged, AI cars respawning directly in your path, and massively imprecise outdoor scrambles. It sounds fun to choose between a path through the trees or a dried-up river bed, but the reality feels like an unfinished tech demo.
There are glimpses of what could have been a fun arcadestyle racer. The UTV handling is responsive, helmet cam is dramatic, and the sunshiny feel of the more traditional circuit races’ visual style is great. But it’s inexcusable that time has been spent giving the grid girls boob jiggle rather than making the game run at even a lowestbar 30fps on PS4. Patches are promised, but this released version is an insult.
VERDICT
One of the most unfinished, least fun games of recent years, and almost unplayably jerky on a standard PS4. A total disaster of a game. Justin Towell