Valentino Rossi: The Game review

Valentino Rossi, number 46.  When someone thinks about football Messi is right around the corner, Rossi is the same when you look at MotoGP. This Italian guy has won many championships and fought out many great motorcycling battles. Developer Milestone must be jumping in joy that they can release a game about this famous sport person but will gamers be happy when they play Valentino Rossi: The Game? Take off your helmet and let’s find out in this review!

THE GOOD

• Valentino Rossi fans are in for a sweet tribute, cutscenes about his impressive career and riding his best races again. The love from Milestone for Valentino is obvious and gamers can take advantage from that. That’s what they call excellent fan service.
• 47 tracks and 15 game modes, including online play. In terms of content Valentino Rossi: The Game is simply incredible and insane.
• MotoGP is the main focus but you can also drift Rally cars in Monza or Misano and ride flat bikes. Giving you many racing options and variation.
• Two-wheeled racing feels and drives completely different than let’s say Forza Motorsport. It is very realistic and fun, turning at high speed gives you that extra adrenaline rush that you can’t find with normal car racers. (this can not be said about the cars in this game, check The Bad)
• Animations are well done, especially when you lose your balance or fall from your bike.
• Tweaking your handling while doing practise runs is a fantastic feature, all the mechanics are easy to understand so even normal gamers can work it out. In other words, you don’t have to be a car or bike genius.  Other racing games can learn from this!

Milestone made its best game so far, clearly because of the love for mister Rossi.

THE BAD

• Bikes and riders look decent enough but the track graphics are disappointingly bad. Blurred textures and lifeless environments.
• When you are racing with 20+ riders the game has major frame rate issues when you are cornering. It doesn’t happen a lot but expect drops below 10 FPS.
• I wasn’t impressed by the sound, a big shame if you ask me. The motorcycle sounds are important for making it a believable experience.
• While its great to have some variation, the car handling is weird. Maybe they should have left those parts out or at least improved the car handling a little.

Conclusion

Score: 71% | MotoGP fans and especially Rossi fans will be able to play Valentino Rossi: The Game for weeks , fans can forgive the average parts from the game more than regular racing fans or gamers in general but I’m sure everyone can have some fun with the two-wheeled monsters.