Review — MotoGP 21

Experience what it takes to become a MotoGP champion or step in the shoes of some of its legends in MotoGP 21.

MotoGP 21 is Milestone’s latest offering in the MotoGP series and the first one to grace the new generation of consoles. Aside from new content and an upgraded roster of riders and bikes, this naturally brings expectations of a much smoother experience due to the new hardware’s capabilities. Yet one has to wonder what the impact of the current pandemic would be on the final product, especially seeing their other franchise Monster Energy Supercross: The Official Videogame took quite a few bumps with it’s latest release back in March.

Down That Road Again

Truth be told, the game’s formula hasn’t changed much from previous years’ iterations. Unless you want to be competitive against other players, the main focus of the game is still its career mode. Like in last year’s game, you can start as a junior team in either MotoGP or the Moto 2 and 3 championships and the goal is to work your way up to becoming the MotoGp champion as you battle it out with riders such as Rossi, Viñales, Marquez and Mir. The managerial side of the campaign also makes its return, allowing you to manage your staff, perform R&D to improve your bike and even establish a new team to go head to head with the official teams of the championship. If you’ve played MotoGP 20, you will probably know the drill as there isn’t much difference in the career mode.

If you want to create your own championship, do some time trails or just do a single race or grand prix, you can do this through the Quick Modes menu. To improve your skills, the game does harbor a pretty advanced tutorial mode which features basic and advances lessons. It is certainly recommended to play this tutorial if this is your first MotoGP game. One mode that didn’t make its return is the Historic mode. This mode offered you various challenges in three skill levels. Completing these challenges allowed you to earn credits to spend in the Historic Market where a limited selection of riders and bikes were being offered with a rarity system. For those looking to add more longevity to the game or enjoy a collectable mechanic in a game, this was a great addition. But I guess it wasn’t very successful and Milestone decided to drop the mode.

Against the World

For those who love to play against other players, there’s some good and bad news. The good news is that the game still offers a decent online mode that makes use of lobbies to play together. You can create both private and public lobbies, so it is perfectly possible to play with a fixed group of racing buddies. The Race Director mode, allowing you to manage every feature during online competition and even assign penalties, which makes this mode mostly interesting for streamers and tournament organizers. The bad news than, is that there is no eSports Championship this year and there still isn’t a split-screen mode in the game.

If you want to race online, you of course want to do it in style. As usual, you will create your own rider, but under Customization you’ll find a whole array of customization options to make everything look according to your tastes. Everything, from bike liveries to costumes and helmets, stickers for you bike and character and even the style of racing numbers can be changed. You want to put a crocodile on your butt as a sticker? Go ahead, pretty much anything is possible and thanks to the simple editor it’s quite easy to make your own designs.

Ups and Downs

So far, most of the features we’ve talked about were also present in MotoGP 20, so the question arises which novelties MotoGP 21 brings to the table. Aside from the revised bike suspension system, the biggest changes in this year’s game include a bike retrieval sequence and the long lap penalty. The bike retrieval sequence allows you to run back to your bike and pick it up after you’ve had a crash. At the moment, this feature does feel a bit unfair as your A.I. opponents will still spawn on their bike. The long lap penalty was introduced in 2019 in MotoGP and is a penalty where riders are forced to take a route outside the circuit forcing them to lose a few seconds. And next to tire wear and fuel consumption, you’ll also have to watch the brake temperatures to keep your bike effective this time around. All these new mechanics can also be disabled though, if they’re too technical for you.

These new gameplay additions mostly serve to increase the feeling of authenticity, but they do not give a significant feeling of a step forward for the franchise. The recycled content, stripped game modes and lack of other improved features make this feel like a slimmed-down and reskinned version of last year’s MotoGP 20.

But what makes it even worse is that this version plays inferior to MotoGP 20. Not only are there barely any graphical improvements noticeable, and this when comparing the Xbox Series S, but the framerate can be an absolute mess at times. I first noticed this during the Italian GP in the career mode where the framerate stuttered like crazy. But as a test I did a quick time trial afterwards and I experienced the exact same issues, even without any other opponents. Given that MotoGP 20 received the FPS Boost-treatment on Xbox Series S and runs at a solid 60 FPS now, I was truly baffled to discover how much smoother last year’s game plays on my Series S. On top of that, MotoGP 20 actually has Quick Resume, whereas the Series X/S version of MotoGP 21 doesn’t even have this feature. For now, MotoGP 21 really feels like a case of one step forward, two steps backward and I really hope that Milestone manages to fix a few of this issues to make this feel less like an inferior copy of last year’s excellent MotoGP 20.

3/5

Reviewed on Xbox Series S.
Download code provided by the publisher.