Game Reviews

Mad Skills BMX

Star onStar onStar halfStar offStar off
|
iOS
| Mad Skills BMX
Get
Mad Skills BMX
|
iOS
| Mad Skills BMX

Trials HD justifiably started a bit of a craze for physics-powered extreme sports games. There have been some pretty decent ones on smartphones and tablets, and some decidedly average ones as well.

Mad Skills BMX unfortunately fits into the latter category. It's fun in small bursts, but its physics are inconsistent, and it never quite manages to stick its rusty claws into you in the way the best examples of the genre do.

Chain gang

The game is a side-on racer that sees you taking control of a BMX and its rider. You need to guide your bicycle over a series of jumps and undulations in as quick a time as possible, racing against a computer-controlled opponent.

Tapping on the left of the screen makes you pedal, while swiping up on the right makes you jump, and swiping down makes you crouch back for more speed and quicker landings. It's a simple system, and it works reasonably well.

The levels are often uninspiring, with few distinguishing features to set them apart from the rest, and for a decent amount of time all you're going to be doing is restarting in frustration after watching the AI sprint off into the distance.

Where Trials cleverly upped its difficulty levels, Mad Skills BMX is hard to begin with and never lets up. That's all well and good when the challenge feels fair, but the simplicity of the controls means even the slightest slip up is almost impossible to recover from.

Pedalling up a mountain

You can challenge your Facebook friends to try and beat your best times on the tracks, and watch videos of the best runs to see where you can shave a few seconds off your time. There are plenty of tracks to tackle, too, so you're never short of a new challenge.

The problem is, that challenge is never particularly fun. Whereas other examples of the genre use your frustrating slip-ups to coax you into another turn, Mad Skills BMX just makes you want to hurl down you iOS device in disgust and go do something else.

yt
Subscribe to Pocket Gamer on

Mad Skills BMX

Unrelentingly difficult, Mad Skills BMX doesn't offer up enough fun-shaped rewards to make the slog through its levels worthwhile
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.