How much you enjoy of Colin McRae: Flat Out depends on how much you’ve been playing Dirt recently.
Monster Energy Supercross 3 is an enjoyable way of spending an hour or two, but a lack of significant progress combined with a fairly ordinary career structure, uninspiring user-created tracks and rocky online performance means that you won't be running home from school desperate to play the next level.
GRID is an enjoyable racing game for those who want to enjoy some close racing without worrying about camber angles. The market needs games like this to provide light and shade. I was hoping this new GRID would be a fresh start, but it's a last night's takeaway re-heated. I enjoy leftovers – cold pizza is one of life's great pleasures – but that doesn't make the perfect racing game when the rest of the world has moved on.
While F1 2019 adds features from the all-time bucket list of many an F1 fan, these new additions aren't quite fully formed yet. This still managed to be the best Formula 1 game by Codemasters to date – the handling of the F2 cars and new online modes are genre defining – but there is always scope for further improvements and some areas are now beginning to feel a little stale. Video gamers can be so demanding sometimes.
MotoGP 19 is far and away the best MotoGP game by Milestone to date and a marked improvement over recent versions. A few glitches take you out of the moment, and there is a need for some special seasoning sprinkled on the top to really make this a truly great racing title, but for fans of the sport, they now have a video game that better represents the action-packed real-life on-track action.
Monster Energy AMA Supercross 2 FIM World Championship - The Official Videogame, to give it the full name on the box, is a step forward from the previous incarnation. It takes elements from other Milestone games such as the improved visuals and track deformation, adds a few unique features of its own and provides a perfectly acceptable dirt racing game experience. But, in a world where acceptable isn't quite good enough, I wish more developers dipped their toes into the bike racing arena to really push Milestone to another level. MEAS2FWCTOVG is solid but uninspiring.
You can skip through the video elements, using R1 for the ‘Clarkson button' and L1 for the ‘James May button'. When you press either, you can hear a little catchphrase from each presenter. So, if you are skipping forward, Clarkson portentously shouts “Come on” or “Hurry up”, whereas while rewinding, May proclaims “Now, wait a minute”. A little nod to each on-show persona. If you've not seen episodes of The Grand Tour, especially if you don't have Amazon Prime, this is a great way to watch the highlights.
The performance of the bikes and uninspiring career structure mean that the game quickly becomes a grind. In the first hour or so of gameplay, you are overwhelmed by the choice of bikes, tracks and artful menu design. But long-term, your excitement is quickly replaced by tedium. Which is a shame.
Dakar 18 is sadly a misjudged game that can feel refreshingly different to start with but ends up being incredibly frustrating, behind the pace and poorly implemented. With a focus on navigation and gruelling competition, refinement of crucial gameplay elements is sorely lacking. Some of the environments are truly epic, but the way the game fails to build upon them means they go to waste.
This is by far and away the best MXGP game to date, and the result of developer Milestone finally getting to grips with the Unreal Engine — despite the recently disappointing MotoGP 18. MXGP Pro still lacks technical polish and misses the magical 'wow' moments that great racing games feature, but this is now a great platform that they can build upon for the future. The difficulty curve will not be for everyone, but MXGP Pro is all the better for it.