Gameplay
MX Superfly featuring Ricky Carmichael offers up the usual palette of game options; that is a single race/event mode and a career mode. The single events and races are best for learning to handle the bike, while the career mode is where the game gets more interesting. In career mode, you customize a rider and then take him through one of two career paths; freestyle or racing. The racing mode is as straightforward as they come; you win races, climb the championship ladder, and work to become the king of motocross, racing against a diverse group of licensed professional riders from the world circuit. In the freestyle mode, you ride around arenas hitting jumps, pulling huge tricks, and getting good enough to move on to more challenging arenas.

Learning to handle your motorbike will take about a half hour at most. The controls are very well put together for racing mode, though they do get crazy in freestyle mode. When in freestyle mode, you obviously must pull off big tricks from the selection of ramps scattered around each arena. The “trick” to pulling tricks is to preload your bike’s suspension, thus allow you to make bigger takeoffs and smoother landings. While you can pull off a lot of basic tricks and hit some great air without learning to preload, you won’t get too far in a freestyle career until you learn the preloading process. While most tricks are easy enough to get wired, you’ll find the more complex tricks are very difficult to pull off with the Xbox controller, requiring multiple button presses at just the right moment. It’s best if you just figure out how to make the most of your favorite basic tricks, and then add on just a few advanced moves at first. If you try to rush through the game randomly button-mashing in hopes of hitting the advanced tricks, you’ll end up smashing headfirst into the ground more often than not.

The overall physics of MX Superfly are pretty sound, though a little too loose for my liking in the freestyle mode. For example, at many points during a freestyle contest, you can slam your bike directly into the bleachers and end up bouncing back onto the track in perfect position, with the bike still happily rolling along! I found myself using these overly loose physics to cheat my way through tricks, which was fun at first, but feels cheap the more you rely on it. During races, the physics become much tighter, for example, slideouts become more common if you rely on the powerslide too often.

There are quite a few add-ons which serve to spice up the game and increase its replayability. Besides the main racing and freestyle modes, there are several mini-games which are required riding if you want to get farther in the freestyle levels. The mini-games are widely varied and a lot of fun, from being a motorcycle riding pizza delivery driver to having to compete in a bus jumping competition.

Along with the mini-games, MX Superfly sports a built-in stunt track editor. Once you tire of the other tracks in the game, you can get down to business and build your own stunt arenas, replete with huge jumps and banked turns.

While MX Superfly supports Xbox Live for downloading new content such as extra riders and bikes, there’s no online play. This is a shame, since MotoGP had online play and it was fantastic. Perhaps an add-on disk will appear in the future (a la MotoGP’s online demo) that allows us to take the game online, but for now, you’re trapped in a split-screen universe if you want to play multiplayer.

Graphics
MX Superfly sports some pretty graphics, though they could be sharper considering the graphical power available to Xbox developers. The riders, tracks and bikes all look good throughout the entire game, but don’t approach the level of looking great. The audiences and ground textures are a serious issue, as they both look and behave rather unrealistically. One graphical issue I had with the game was that you never seem to kick up any dirt or gravel, even when washing the rear wheel out through the rockiest of turns. Audiences are bland and stiff, lacking any detail and they don't seem to react to what was happening on the track in any discernable way.

Overall, the graphics are very nice, but they don’t seem to push the Xbox in ways that other games (ahem…MotoGP) do. While pleasing to the eye, MX Superfly’s graphics probably won’t wow you at any point.

Sound
5.1 Dolby ensures that you’ll enjoy most of the soundtrack for MX Superfly. With a wide variety of bands ranging from classic punk by the Vandals to modern nu-metal, you’ll find something that rocks your rider here. If you can’t find anything you like, MX Superfly allows you to (as all Xbox games should) load up your custom Xbox soundtracks.

The bike sounds are typically annoying. Yet again we have another motorcycle racing title where the bikes themselves tend to sound like rampaging Singer sewing machines. The voices of the riders and the announcers are pretty vanilla, shouting out “woohoo” and other inane dialog throughout the races. The other sounds of racing, such as the thumping of tires, bikes hitting a skid and the crunch of a bike crash are all good enough to make up for the lifeless voice work.

Replayability
As mentioned in the gameplay section, you have so many add-ons for MX Superfly, you’ll be hard pressed to find yourself not playing it for many months to come. The track editor lets you build your own freestyle courses, while the Xbox Live connection allows you to download new riders and bikes. Mini-games, which vary from great to goofy, give you more reasons to play MX Superfly again and again.

To sum it up, while MX Superfly featuring Ricky Carmichael isn’t as polished as MotoGP, it’s still a solid game. Will it win “Game of the Year”? Probably not, but you’ll certainly get plenty of enjoyment out of it. It’s definitely worth a rent, though you’ll probably find yourself purchasing it once you get into it.

See more screens on the MX Superfly featuring Ricky Carmichael media page