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Unlike most other vehicle simulations, there’s a point where motorcycle racing games inevitably get stuck. With a car or a plane, you can pretty closely replicate the real control interface with a videogame controller. The sticks handle direction, the buttons cover everything else. Now that analog control is the standard everywhere, those more or less do the job, and there are flight yokes and steering-wheel setups available to satisfy the truly mad.

With a motorcycle, things are more complicated. You talk to a motorcycle, especially a fast racing bike, through more than just a wheel and a couple of pedals – you control the thing with your entire body, an experience gamepads and other wired widgets aren’t exactly equipped to duplicate.

Milestone, the maker of Capcom’s MotoGP 07, has a lot of experience with bike racing games going back through the better part of a decade.  It’s done about as good a job here as anyone is going to manage. It’s a visually impressive replication of the MotoGP circuit, and it has a lot of options to suit players of different skill levels. But it’s still not much like actually riding a bike, which means it can’t help but feel a little disappointing.

Down in the Pits

MotoGP is based on the race series of the same name, and features all the teams and circuits of the ongoing 2007 campaign. It’s not completely up-to-date, but that’s a good thing in some ways. For instance, you can ride the bikes of the now-defunct Ilmor GP team, which dropped out of the series a few races into the real-life season. (That’s why there’s 21 riders to choose from in the game, whereas if you check out the MotoGP website right now you’ll only see 19 listed there.)

There’s a great many options to toggle, between tracks, teams, bikes, transmission options, and so forth, but the most important one is the choice of handling model. There are three – arcade, advanced, and simulation – and to the game’s credit they’re not just shorthand for “easy, medium, hard.” It’s still plenty difficult with arcade handling, just difficult in a different way.

Picking more realistic handling is a trade-off. The bikes are more stable with the arcade handling, more car-like for lack of a better term, but they’re also less responsive. Picking a more advanced setting grants you more control over the bike, but you’d better know what you’re going to do with that control. In particular, you’d better spend some time with the training mode (which has some well-designed tutorial challenges) learning how to peg the right braking distance into a turn. Without the physical feedback of actually being on the bike, it takes effort to visually judge how fast is too fast.

Even on the arcade setting, this is tougher to learn than Namco’s old MotoGP games, which were the next thing to Ridge Racer on two wheels. It’s more rewarding as a consequence, of course, and much more believable – the mechanics and animations of leaning into a turn, for example, are more realistic by far.

Ultimately, though, there’s still some distance between moving a stick to the left or right and the complex actions involved in leaning a bike into a turn. On the highest level of realism, MotoGP 07 gives a lot of control over how you move the rider’s weight around the bike (and the animation matches those inputs very well), but it’s not quite enough to keep it from feeling like a weirdly artificial experience sometimes. It feels a bit like playing a game that has motorcycles on the screen, which is not quite the same as a motorcycle simulation.

Track Day Special

Players who don’t feel the need to get so uptight about the distance between simulation and reality should be satisfied with MotoGP 07’s presentation, which does the job of replicating the real-life series and then some. The championship has every race at every course in the proper order - 18 races in all. The circuits look beautiful, with lots of background detail – stands, pits, and punters climbing all around the fences.

This is more a compliment towards the series itself than the game (though Milestone obviously deserves props for a fine job of modeling), but the course selection is world-class. MotoGP is a truly international race series, hitting circuits on four continents, and every course has its own personality. They all have their distinctive challenges, from the slow curves on the second half of Donington Park to the up-and-down at Istanbul to the fast, long turns of the Australian GP.

Add it all up and there’s a lot of racing for the money here, which earns the game a recommendation. If you’ve enjoyed less arcade-ey motorcycle racers before, like THQ’s MotoGP releases or Milestone’s own Superbike games on the PC, then this is a good example of the same kind of game. It has its problems, but it’s not as if nearly every other bike sim hasn’t had those problems too.

Review by: D.F. Smith
Video Produced by: Paul Bonanno