Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX for the PlayStation One was an all around solid game. Gamers were set to roam free in order to complete a list of objectives at areas ranging from Mirra’s backyard to professional arenas, and although the game bared striking resemblances to the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series it was still loads of fun. Unfortunately, Acclaim went bankrupt so the series was taken under the wing of Crave Entertainment. It’s tragic to see one of your past favorites be absolutely slaughtered, but the developers at Crave had no mercy when they created the abomination known as Dave Mirra BMX Challenge.

When will it end?

The premise of the game resides in the career mode, which hardly feels like a career at all. Throughout the 12 different levels, ranging from jungles and science museums to suburban city settings, you don’t have any clear cut objectives. Instead, you start off a race with five other bikers and just pedal forward. You earn stars for your performance by reaching the finish before others and riding with style.

Already the premise is horrible, as this has to be one of the poorest excuses for a career mode ever. The only difference between your career and a random event is that you might be able to unlock the occasional hidden clothing item for any of the stereotypical biker figures. Your progress is measured by how many stars you earn, how many backpacks you find, and how many hidden gaps you clear. There’s no sense of accomplishment whatsoever, and the only challenge here lies within combating the shoddy controls.

As far as maneuvering goes, the controls are oversensitive and unresponsive, which makes for an incredibly frustrating experience. You can steer left or right by tilting the Wii Remote in the respective direction, but the movement is extremely choppy. There’s no fluid movement to be seen, but rather your biker looks and feels like he isn’t interacting with the environment around him in any way. You can jump by flicking the remote up, but any sudden movement is likely to set off this action. Holding ‘1’ or ‘2’ in conjunction with the D-pad will perform tricks, while the D-pad is also used to spin in mid-air (instead of tilting the remote, which feels a lot more natural). Because of this, you’ll probably end up performing only two different tricks because you gain more adrenaline by spinning and tricking at the same time. Worst of all, there’s no way to combat your opponents, and what’s the point of playing against other people if you can’t beat the living daylights out of them?

Adrenaline, which is marked by a Monster logo, gets your biker pumped up and ready for action. Once you perform enough tricks to fill it up, the rider will simply take off in whatever direction he is facing without any user input. Because of this, if you accidentally land a spin facing the wrong way, you will take off at full speed going backwards. When your rider isn’t hopped up on Monster Energy drinks, he’ll travel at a painstakingly slow pace. Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam was fun because you moved at blistering speeds so there was never a dull moment. In BMX Challenge, you travel so slow that, on the average, you have at least five seconds to plan out your next move. Unless waiting around idly with the Wii Remote in your hand is your idea of fun, you’ll be bored out of your mind within minutes of turning on your console.

To put the icing on the cake, the level design is downright atrocious. Any given race takes about four minutes to get to the end line, so you’d expect the tracks to be somewhat complex. Instead of having even the smallest amount of creativity, the developers simply loop parts of the track over and over again to add substance. Basically, you’ll go down a hill, come across a few jumps, and hit a few turns before you end up exactly where you started. Once you’re about halfway done with the race a new part of the track will open up, allowing you to repeat the second half of the track for a few minutes before finally finishing. The small amount of actual level design is horrendous though; they should have named this game Dave Mirra Slow Speed Slalom Course. The world is littered with trash cans, boulders, and other obstacles that do nothing but slow down the pace of the game even more. Combine this with grind rails that lead straight into walls and some miniscule jumps and you have yourself the worst BMX game of all time.

They couldn’t possibly release a game this bad, could they?

It really is a shame that publishers are allowed to release games as bad as BMX Challenge because it must hurt the Wii’s reputation as a formidable opponent to the PS3 or Xbox 360. The visuals include painfully simple textures, simple models, and tons of clipping. There’s no artistic inspiration to be seen, and the technology used is comparable to that of a late PS1 title at best. Likewise, the few generic sound effects will more than likely go unnoticed, and the limp background guitar tracks are a joke. The menus don’t look absolutely horrible, although there is a bit of a delay when you scroll through menus, so again you’ll find that you have to slow things down a bit.

If you think the multiplayer mode will help this game redeem itself even the slightest bit, think again. The races are just as boring as before because there’s no interaction between characters, and even the few game modes that do involve some sort of direct competition aren’t entertaining in the least bit. Just because you can play with a few buddies will not make up for the terrible controls and tedious gameplay.

Conclusion

Unless you are Dave Mirra himself, it’s tremendously difficult to find even one reason as to why you’d want to even look at this game on a store’s shelf. This shameful excuse for a game shouldn’t even be allowed to be sold in stores, and I feel terribly sorry for anybody who so much as played this game prior to reading this review. If you do purchase this game, I wish you good luck, and may God have mercy on your soul.