Reviews// American Chopper

So for the most part, American Chopper is actually a straight-forward racing game rather than an engineer 'em up. Taking place just outside of a not very NY looking New York, you're presented with a reasonably expansive free-roaming environment to bike around in and an assortment of missions set within these confines. But these missions are all racing based, with nothing like the diversity of options as in, say, San Andreas. There are drag races: equating to a gear-shift challenge; standard first past the post races, and some chase/be chased/collect things variants. But basically, this is just a racing game on bikes.

That's not inherently a problem, we do like racing games; it's just that this isn't a particularly good one. The bike handling often seems unbalanced and, falling into the trap of certain other US based racing games, the grids of long straight roads don't make for the most exciting tests of skill. Some of these races seem to really drag towards the latter stages, and there were many occasions where we were lulled into that motorway style auto-pilot driving usually enjoyed by long-haul truckers listening to Genesis albums on repeat mode. Even some of the earliest races can last for over 10 minutes, and frankly, they get boring within three. Although the speed of the bikes is quite respectable, the pace of the game itself just doesn't cut the mustard. We like our racing games either fast and snappy, like Burnout 3 or Outrun 2, or otherwise protracted and extraordinarily detailed, like Gran Turismo 3 and, um, Gran Turismo 4. This just sits uncomfortably between the two without being particularly entertaining or realistic.

American Chopper isn’t a terrible game: the graphics, for instance, are quite acceptable by budget standards and the size of the game’s city environment is decent enough. But it’s this overt mediocrity that will cement an apathetic consumer response. It’s all just so vaguely passable that you’ll think you should be enjoying it, but because there’s none of that X factor, you probably won’t. It doesn’t have the honesty of many cut-price games which sport terribly crude screenshots and cheaply designed packaging: it’s not as obviously lame as the weakest in the genre, but it also lacks the garnish it so desperately needs. Racing around on enormous motorcycles should be a great deal of fun, but somehow, it‘s not. And to anyone attracted by the somewhat specialist TV licensing, there’ll be disappointment a-plenty. It does feature polygonised characters from the show, but that’s as far as it goes, you don’t really get to ‘build’ your own ‘American Chopper’. Simply put, this game doesn’t deserve to sound as interesting as it does.