It is amazing to see how the extreme sports genre has exploded in recent years. I remember playing Epyx's California Games on my Commodore 64, pulling off spins and flips in the BMX portion and enjoying it immensely. Many years later, everyone and their mother has an extreme sports game, it seems, with certain titles standing as the standard bearers. For skateboarding, Tony Hawk is the king. BMX games have to deal with Acclaim's Dave Mirra BMX. When quality games like these are available, any challengers to the throne must bring something new and addictive to the table in order to compete. Midway's Gravity Games Bike: Street Vert Dirt fails to challenge the king - and doesn't even rank as mediocre.
You like advertisements? Gravity Games Bike has you covered. With so-so graphics draped in product placement, Gravity Games Bike looks more like a last-generation game than anything the PS2 is capable of. With dark, drab colouring and so-so textures, this is a singularly unattractive game. Texture tearing and warping is rampant, especially when the player gets near walls, berms, dips - basically anywhere you'd expect your bike to go in order to perform tricks. Hell, Matt Hoffman BMX on the PS One looks better than this drek. While the levels are certainly large enough to explore, there's not much point to it since the level design didn't provide many places to trick off.
Speaking of performing tricks, you'll be hard pressed to get any off in this game. The control is incredibly stiff, and punishes the player if you're off in the slightest. In fact, performing any sort of modifier or manual is maddening - the timing seems arbitrary, rewarding you for guessing as opposed to any sort of skill. Control is paramount in trick-based games of this type, and there's no way on earth that Gravity Games Bike comes close to doing what it should. The bare minimum is what's available here, and that's simply not good enough. The trick system isn't balanced, giving the player huge point bonuses for performing the same trick over and over again. Lame? Poorly balanced? No skill needed? YES.
Like Tony Hawk 3 and Dave Mirra, there are goals on each level to achieve in order to advance. Bike around collecting letters, earning kudos, finding people, hitting certain spots on the level - all the regular suspects are here. Biking about to achieve these goals is an exercise in frustration, however. If you're not wiping out through the geometry and getting stuck, you're respawning inside a ramp or wall after crashing. These kind of bugs should have been caught in Midway's QA during the game's development - and if these bugs were caught and the game was shipped anyways, I can only shake my head at this apparent disrespect to the intellect of the gaming public.
With anemic sound, only a few pro riders available compared to other games, a weak soundtrack and no create-a-park option, Gravity Games Bike just doesn't get the job done. Frankly, if this game was on PC, I'd be torn between looking for a patch or the uninstall option - and that's as damning an indictment as I can offer.
