Mobile gaming isn’t my thing at all, and while I appreciate that there are so many cross-over titles to the Nintendo Switch, I’d rather play dedicated PC/console games that aren’t two-a-penny cash grabs. They’re almost like AI-generated titles that have ‘zero fun’ in the prompts. Mad Skills BMX 2 is a mobile-like game; however, it’s actually pretty good, though the developers clearly kept ‘rage bait’ in those prompts, and Ultimate Games wanted to be part of it.
There’s no story, don’t be silly, so you grab your BMX and race against the locals to earn cash to upgrade your bike, apply custom paint jobs, and add some new threads. A well-paced tutorial teaches the moves, which are pump and jump. Mad Skills BMX 2 works as an automated runner because as soon as you leave the gates, your bike will keep moving forward. To keep that momentum, you have to push up or down at the right time.
Pumping will mean holding down when going over multiple bumps, or expediting a landing to increase speed, where jumping will, well, jump as you leave the Earth to obtain some air. In the career mode, you complete a series of stages against randoms that are straightforward enough and unlikely that you’ll lose in the first area unless you don’t upgrade the stats on your bike. These are speed, pump, and, of course, jump.
At the end of each area is a boss that you have to beat in a slightly more challenging stage. Once you’ve done that, you win their BMX, which effectively ‘uncaps’ the stats and allows you to invest in a couple of upgrades for the new one, taking on the next area and so on. Everything went swell up until stage 2-8, and I honestly thought I was going to launch the Switch 2. Timing is absolutely essential at this point, and while having superior wheels, I’d continually cock up by jumping too soon or too late, resulting in my opponent overtaking. There are only two competitors, so if you don’t win, you have to restart.
I seldom get so triggered, but this stage really pissed me off and undid all the fun I’d had with Mad Skills BMX 2 to that point. You’re thrown a bone by being able to use consumable rockets to either catch up or get ahead, but as a consumable, it’s limited. You can either spend all your money on new rockets or wait an hour or so for some free ones to refill. Aha, this is where we have the mobile gaming model, and without being arsed to even look this up on the Play Store, I’d assume there are microtransactions to get ‘better’ at the game with these rockets.
The thing is, they don’t really work, and there’s no way to replay stages to re-earn the money, so not only will you be out of rockets, you won’t be able to buy custom paint jobs, and we all know how I feel about customisation in a game. The long and short of it is to learn the tracks, as if you were learning the moves of a boss in a Souls-like. With time and patience, it does pay off, but the difficulty spike is a little silly. Rather than hit a wall, you can exit the career mode for some basic arcade action, challenges, and even local multiplayer, which is fun if you have friends or can guilt-trip the kids/your significant other. Mad Skills BMX 2 is better than I expected, though that mobile-model rearer its head and spoiled a good part of gameplay with the rocket mechanic.
