Future Publishing


American Chopper

Author: Dan Geary
Publisher: Activision
Machine: Xbox (EU Version)

 
Published in Official Xbox Magazine #50

Pimp UR motorbike?! This tiresome two-wheeled TV show cash-in isn't even that interesting

American Chopper (Activision)

A terrible Frankenstein's monster of a game that looks like it was cobbled together in about two weeks from the grave-robbed remains of rejected Neversoft projects, American Chopper is the idiot, hog-riding hillbilly cousin of the Need For Speed titles, and they were already stupid enough to begin with.

It's the amusing Discovery Channel show about scary, unpredictable bike 'artistes' Paul Snr and Paul Jnr and their custom chopper shop in game form - a licence with some potential, you might think. Not one that's taken advantage of here, though. You're the 'new guy' in the American Chopper garage, fulfilling a number of exciting missions such as finding a fat man and driving him back to the shop, delivering a bike from one end of a motorway to another, or one-on-one racing vs dullard CPU riders, set mostly in a generic grey-brown Dullsville USA. It's a real barrel of laughs.

With its unchallenging, directionless missions, shonky, brittle handling and horrorsome graphics, American Chopper is like a worst-of compilation of all the most boring bits of games from the past five years, a GTA where you can't fire guns or steal a better vehicle, or even get off and walk; a Crazy Taxi with the sense of speed and mayhem clumsily scraped out with a bent spoon. Even the entire point of the show - bike customisation - only exists in the form of the occasional opportunity to add a useless cosmetic component to your 'ride' at the end of the odd mission. It's like they not so much 'developed' this as found it in a forgotten filing cabinet marked "Please recycle" in Activision's basement (see above). Purchase at your peril.

Verdict

Trundle about on a boring bike doing not much at all. Like a malformed EA game they forgot to put the gloss on. Yuck.

Dan Geary

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