Legends BMX – PS5 Review

Legends BMX is an action sports title from Saga Legends Games and while it’s usually the skateboarders who tend to be the most-targeted in this sub-genre, there have been a handful of decent BMX titles over the years.  8-Bit gamers will remember BMX Simulator from Codemasters back in the day while PS1-era players had Matt Hoffman’s Pro BMX  and the excellent Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX.

Despite the ‘Legends’ monicker, the game doesn’t give you any of them to play as.  The riders on offer aren’t your Mirra/Hoffman/Bestwick types.  Instead, you just get a choice of generic riders (such names as Anita and Mike), four small arenas and a choice of bike colours.  These are all unlocked over time as your points total levels you up.  So, initially, you get a choice of two riders, a couple of bike colours and are placed on the first arena.  Here you can either ride around freely or initiate a Time Attack.  This gives you fifty seconds to rack up as many points as possible.

That means doing tricks and, for the most part, the riding and tricking system work reasonably well.  You steer with the left stick and chamber your jump by pressing and then releasing it while on a quarter-pipe to get some air.  In the air you’ll control your rider with the left stick (forcing spins or back/forward slips) and you will initiate tricks using the eight directions of the right stick.  You hold them to extend their durations.

Meanwhile, initiates grinds if you’re on a lip.  You’d expect it to be but don’t.  That’ll just reset your rider.  And wheelies just involve you pulling or pushing on the right stick on flat ground.  So, pulling off tricks is reasonably easy.  Unlike the Tony Hawk or SKATE games, you’re just holding a direction.  The only skill is in timing when to let go.  Chaining together tricks is possible but the scoring system doesn’t seem to reward it in the way you’d expect.  There’s no multipliers for additional spins or combos, just a points total rising in a way that doesn’t give any clues as to what’s scoring well and what isn’t.  Tony Hawk set the standard here, all you have to do is copy it so it’s weird that they didn’t.

Rather than the usual behind-the-player viewpoint, Legends BMX uses a higher up, forced camera angle, similar to the Tony Hawk games on the Gameboy Advance but, aside from that, you’ll get the usual mix of jumps, wheelies/manuals, grinds, spins and grabs that you’d expect from a BMX game.  This can initially be a bit confusing and you will crash often at first but by the end you’ll just jump, hold a direction, let go, land, jump, hold a different direction and so on.  And that’s enough because the points you need to unlock things are cumulative so it doesn’t matter if you do well or not.  The only reason to do push things and try to be riskier is to get a better position on the leaderboards.  And that’s good to have but unfortunately the leaderboard is shown after every run and it takes a few seconds to populate.  Surely, all you want in this kind of game is a quick restart.  Instead, you have to wait for the game to chat up and then start pressing things.  Just put me back in the action.

Aside from Time Attacks, there is nothing else to do.  No level goals, no careers, no story.  Just fifty second rides.  Over and over.  That’s what really lets the game down.  You’ll have unlocked the fourth arena within half an hour and after that all that is left to do is unlock pointless new characters (including guys dressed as animals) and bike colours.  The characters don’t have different stats, skills or move sets.  The bikes all behave exactly the same.  It’s just such a wasted opportunity.

Indeed, the only thing to do is to try to max out the trophies but these are just so badly designed that they are actually worth mentioning.  Do you really want to play for 50 hours?  Do you want to play 5000 sessions?  And how do you do a combo of 135,000 points when the game’s combo system barely exists.  You can’t chain air tricks with a manual and you can’t do enough of them to get anywhere close to that total.  It’s not like you can upgrade a stat to give you more airtime.

That’s the whole thing with Legends BMX.  The game engine is competent, albeit a little inconsistent with its physics (some ramps seem to speed up your motion and tricks for no good reason) but there’s nothing hanging off of it.  A few basic unlocks and a broken trophy list (with no Platinum, what is this 2012?).  You’ll have seen everything this game has to offer within an hour of starting it.  And, to be fair, the first level is probably the best one anyway.

At least the presentation is a little bit better.  The clean, forced 3D look is acceptable enough while the music is just some easy to ignore big beat sort of stuff.  It’s fine.  And the menu works, which isn’t always the case with these indie PC game ports.

Legends BMX feels like a good start.  Something to build a bigger, better-featured game onto.  But in its current state, it feels like a demo.  And not even a good demo like the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater one.  Just a tech demo waiting for a real game to be grafted onto it.  And as such, it only really represents an hour or so of fun before you’re left scratching your head and wondering where the rest of the game is.