ATV Offroad Fury

"On multiplayer, ATV is as good as it gets. Go on, smash your joypad against your best mate's head then"

Quad bikes just aren't right. There's something fundamental about them that seems designed to cause injury. They're not as stable as cars, nor as manoeuvrable as motorcycles, and they hurt when they land on you. The only other group besides the sculpted facial hair/$400 fleece jacket/whooping extreme sports-types that would touch a quad is farmers. This is my case.

So naturally, quad bikes and their gibbering pilots make perfect material for a game. It seems amazing that Sony originally had no plans to bring ATV Offroad Fury to Europe, but be grateful that 'key personnel' saw fit to 'repurpose certain marketing pathways' in such a far-sighted way. What this means is that some suits said 'yes'. Now don't do these craven yes-men a disservice by not playing it. It's hilarious.

The main single player mode is Pro-Career, where you can unlock all the tracks for use in other modes. There's also a faster quad to be had by successfully completing this championship, and while it's worth having, it's a shame there's only one upgraded chariot to unlock. Mind you, as this quad (recognizable by the number '1' plate) has fully maxed out abilities, there's nowhere further to go. Once you've got the Ravage 1000 (for that is its very silly name), there's nothing else worth considering. But until then each vehicle has four important stats to weigh up: traction, acceleration, top speed and stability.
No quad other than the Ravage 1000 is good in all areas, so it's important you choose something that'll be competitive for the style of track - and your style as well. There's scope for a bit of tuning in the garage, but every good thing comes at the expense of something else. More speed equals less acceleration, for instance.

It won't take long to complete the Pro-Career, unfortunately. It's easily finished in an evening, despite taking in tracks of all kinds. ATV Offroad Fury has stadium tracks, mountainous outdoor circuits and checkpoint racing across wide-open terrain, and each track offers a distinctly different challenge. The stadium circuits are the most technically challenging, with seemingly thousands of vicious bumps per lap. Simply going flat out up the first slope you reach is rarely the way to a quick time, however, and this is where the pleasure of ATV awaits. There are 'lines' for each sequence of bumps and finding a rhythm - even if it means slowing down - is key to successful racing.

It feels weird at first, but it's incredibly satisfying once you've learned the track and know how to get those smooth, momentum sustaining landings. It's especially satisfying when you're in multiplayer and your competitor comes flying past, thinking he's got you, only to come to a complete halt two bumps later on. Then you can sail right into his head and knock him off.

There's a fair amount of rolling around in the dirt whether you get hit or not. It's vital to land smoothly, preferably on all four wheels at the same time, as landing at crazy angles can knock your rider's feet clean off the pegs. If this happens you'll be unable to steer for several seconds - although it's much more likely you'll just bail off completely. While it's almost always amusing to watch your little rider waving his or her arms and legs helplessly as they arc, screaming, into the sky and over a cliff, it doesn't boost your chances. In single player it's not too drastic, as the catch-up has been implemented brilliantly - even riders of the fastest quad will need to battle wheel to wheel - but in multiplayer it's deadly. You can easily lose six or seven seconds from one crash, as the rider reset function only works in practice sessions. The actual delay seems quite random, and often if nobody else stacks it, you haven't got a chance.

So you've learned how to launch yourself higher by preloading the suspension and you've mastered how to land safely by leaning again in the air to get the right angle. So what's left to encourage you to fall off? Stunts.
The stunts in ATV can't approach Tony Hawk's kind of levels, but they're fun nevertheless in a cheesy, so-crap-they're-good kind of way. Annoyingly, they're not worth anything except their comedy value during races. Implementing a power-up once you've built up enough stunts would be a nice feature for the sequel.

I hope by then they would have sorted the tracks out. The number is not the problem - there are 23 - an many are fantastically well designed. The immense 'freestyle' areas are particularly good, with scatterings of objects in keeping with the level's theme and some truly breathtaking jumps. It's fun just looning around these areas, searching out new things to jump off, over or into.
The stadium levels are pretty good as well, but too many of the National circuits fail to provide exciting challenges. It doesn't help that a very strange color palette has been used, which leads to most tracks being yellow or gray on a slightly darker yellow or gray background. When straying just a few feet off the track can mean being whisked back several corners as punishment, the last thing you need is a badly defined surface. The problem only gets worse in multiplayer.

That's especially bad news for this game, as four-player battles are insanely addictive. Graphically the game suffers badly, with heavy fogging and the absence of dust effects, but you'd need a heart of stone not to be laughing out (roflmao-ing, lollollollol-ing for the AOL speakers among us) by the end of lap one.

It's one of the few games on PS2 that manages to come near the sheer perfection of multiplayer gaming that's called Timesplitters and that's a considerable achievement.
The control is fantastic, the crashes are hilarious and the multiplayer works extremely well. It's the perfect antidote to all those po-faced driving sims. If you regularly plug in the multitap, you need this game. It's as simple as that.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/19/03, Updated 01/19/03