Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX Review

What the hell started brewing on the PC gaming market when we had the chance to see three classical extreme sports games in the last couple of months? Two whole skateboarding games and now this BMX tricks thingy... This may be the first PC game dealing with BMX ever since the popular California Games. Acclaim is obviously trying to get at Activision for Tony and take money from the fans of THPS. It decided to use the live biking-legend Dave Mirra as well as ten more professional players, engaged some lively bands and sports equipment manufacturers in the project, and rally hurried to publish the game... Really, really hurried...

I know that games like this are mostly coded for PSX, and I doubt the situation will seriously change soon, but I would really like to know why they didn't devote some more attention to this port. My first reaction was none other than "Oh, no, not yet another f---ing PSX conversion"...after seeing the intro running in a small window in the middle of the screen, and the pathetic main menu. It looks as if somebody took a 320x200 picture and stretched it over the entire screen. I will never understand the people who port the PSX games to PC; why don't they at least redraw the picture behind the main menu? I guess it would be too hard to remodel the entire 3D engine, but I'm just talking about a couple of simple pictures here... I find both the developers and publishers quite impertinent for releasing something like this. Pictures of drivers, fonts, and rotating bike models with their three frames per second look horrible, and even the colors seem dull and monotonous.

You can only imagine how I felt and what I expected to hit me after I push that start button. Fortunately, and that was probably because I expected something much worse, I wasn't too disappointed. You cannot say the game is too good or too bad. The engine look like any other several-years-old engine with some upsides and some downsides to it. Textures of ramps, buildings, boxes, pools, and ground are OK, but the textures of fences, trees bushes, and people simply suck. They look pixelated even from far away, not to mention what they look like when you get closer. The worst are the textures surrounding the terrains, which are supposed to look like forests, as they give you an impression of a feeble stage set. This is a typical flaw of all PSX conversions.

Objects and number of polygons are fortunately much better. The driver and his bike are relatively abundant with polys, and that goes for most of the ramps and other objects, even though there are a couple of "brilliant" exceptions here. If these things start to bother you, you better switch to the overhead mode, which will give you a wider perspective from above, and from sufficient distance to hide most of the graphical flaws. This will also give you a nice overview of the situation, so it soon became my favorite camera mode.

Freestyle BMX is extremely playable, and that is surely the best aspect of this game. The controls mostly resemble the controls in the two aforementioned skateboard games, or to be more precise, Tony Hawk, which was a great success in that field. The developers say they implemented some 1300 tricks, which will be accessible depending on your bike and skill level. There is no reason to panic here, as they are easy to perform, even without much practice, which will leave a good impression about playability. The game will tolerate more of your errors, which makes the game somewhat less frustrating. Even if you do make a slight mistake when jumping, the computer will forgive you, and you won't have to see your character eat dirt all the time. Once you do fall though, be sure you are to blame. Finally, you can watch a replay of your performance, but the game unfortunately lacks the option to save it to disk.