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Review: MotoGP 2013

I was seriously worried when I first started playing MotoGP 2013. For the few months leading up to its release, the game was looking promising. Graphically, the bikes looked awesome, the tracks were beautifully detailed; everything really seemed to be coming together nicely. Then I loaded my first race and I witnessed what was easily the worst frame-rate issues I’ve ever seen in a game to date, and I began to ask myself how Milestone could have gone so wrong. Fortunately as I started to spend more time with the game, things started to turn around.

As you’d expect, MotoGP 2013 features all the standard race modes you’d expect to find in your seasonal racing game (except for time trial, which was weirdly only added via a recent patch). The only real noticeable change comes with career mode, which is similar to that of MotoGP 2008. In this this year’s release, you don’t need to focus about building your team from the ground-up. While you still hire a race engineer (whose sole purpose really is to send you pointless emails about your progress after each race), the need to hire other staff for bike upgrades and team sponsors are all a thing of the past, thankfully.

As you participate in each race you’re able to nominate a rival, which if beaten, allows you to possibly score a contract to join that team later in the season. The one thing I liked about this was you’re never stuck to a team for the entire year, which keeps the game from getting boring.

Sticking with career mode for a little longer, something which I found slightly disappointing was how you still needed to complete a season with the lower-tiered bikes before you can progress to the MotoGP class. I appreciate that Milestone provide gamers with three classes to choose from (it’s something that the F1 franchise has desperately needed to implement), but having to complete two full seasons before you can actually play the career mode with the bikes you bought the very game for shouldn’t have to happen. Yes, it helps to ease you into the increased power and difficulty of the 500cc bikes, but as with everything in gaming, let me make this choice myself. I gave up midway through the Moto2 season and just stuck to racing MotoGP bikes in Championship mode, because I couldn’t be bothered grinding through career any longer.

Moving on, as far as gameplay is concerned, MotoGP 2013 doesn’t disappoint. As I’ve found with all motorbike games, it’s once you understand the mechanics that the game really gets into its stride (protip: slow down almost entirely using the front brakes only), and you get to truly enjoy that different style of racing that isn’t really offered with your standard car-based racers. Done away is the ridiculous points system during the race too, which really killed the feeling of authenticity in the previous titles in the franchise. MotoGP 2013 is perhaps the only game in the series since MotoGP 2008 that I feel actually deserves the ‘officially licensed product’ stamp on the front of the box.

While MotoGP 2013 itself is a solid racer, where it falls apart is in its presentation – and while some might argue that graphics don’t make a game, it’s an important aspect that I’d like to mention in this review. Playing a race and having frame-rate issues shouldn’t be acceptable in a game this late into the current generation. Pixelated photos of your rider and your team member’s faces also shouldn’t be acceptable in a game in 2013 either. Hell, the presentation is so lackluster in this game that even the pre-race videos which show actual footage of the cities each track is located in, is shown in low resolution. It just seems like it’s the simple things have been ignored by the developers.

The MotoGP franchise is, and always has been a franchise that doesn’t seem to get the attention it deserves when it comes to video games. Yes, it is arguably the best in the franchise to date, but it still lacks the flare and gloss that you’d see from series like F1 or GRID. In my review of GRID 2, I mentioned that the game looked amazing, played well, but didn’t really push the bar as far as the genre was concerned. With MotoGP 2013, while you’ll definitely have fun when you’re actually racing, it’s all the other features of this game which sadly let it down. MotoGP 2013 is a solid racer that I’m sure other petrol-heads will enjoy, but as a game itself, it’s sadly still a few years behind.


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About the author

Nicholas Simonovski

Events and Racing Editor at Stevivor.com. Proud RX8 owner, Strange Music fan and Joe Rogan follower. Living life one cheat meal at a time.