Roaring engines, screaming fans, huge air, and suicidal tricks. These are all the ingredients necessary for a successful dirt-bike competition. In THQ's new MX Superfly, Pacific Coast Power & Light attempts to capture the rush and excitement of dirt-biking and comes darn close to nailing it perfectly. Dirt-bike competitions can only hold your attention for so long, however, and unless you're a hardcore fan, MX Superfly will start to lose momentum pretty quickly.

The visuals are absolutely gorgeous and exactly what you would expect from a fairly high-profile game like this one. The bikes look and feel like bikes, the riders look and move like riders, and the grass, well it pretty much acts like grass. If you're on a dirk track, you'll even notice that your clothes are little less clean then when you started. Aside from the necessarily cheesy looking crowds, there was not one aspect of competition I could think of that hadn't been implemented into the game itself. You're even treated to some impressive video footage of real competitions whenever you pass a milestone in the Career mode. I think it would have been nice if your rider and bike were a little more customizable though. The only real complaint I had was the complete lack of explosions. If a bike falls that far down the side of a cliff it's gonna blow up, I mean come on!

I guess we have to leave explosions behind now and get onto some sound issues. The sounds effects are realistic and appropriate. The engines roar (or buzz, for some of those Japanese bikes), the fans cheer, etc. My absolute favorite would have to be your rider screaming whenever you bail off the bike high in the air. The sound effects pretty much sit there in the background not bothering anyone, as they should in a game like this. The music is your usual montage of various tracks, ala Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. It's got punk, alternative, rap, you name it.

The gameplay in MX Superfly can basically be divided into three parts: Racing, Freestyle, and Mini-Games. Racing is pretty straight-forward. You try to beat the other racers to the finish line; however this has gotten far more technical since the days of Excitebike. Aside from just accelerating, braking, turning and landing, you have powersliding, bike tilt, and the throttle to worry about. Many of these things, especially the throttle, can be completely foreign to people with no mechanical know-how, but the manual and in-game tutorial does a good job of covering them.

Next we come to my personal favorite, the Freestyle. The objective of the Freestyle is to gain the most points in the allotted time; points are gained by doing tricks. Basically you try to get as much air as you can, pull off as many tricks as possible on the way down, and then land perfectly straight. However, the thing that separates the winners from the losers is the spring. You can load the front of your bike with a spring as you approach the ramps; timing everything perfectly nets you a lot more air than usual, which will get you more points.

Finally we have the Mini-Games, and MX Superfly is loaded with them. Some, such as the Crazy Taxiesque pizza delivery, just aren't very much fun. Others are great, like Moto-golf. Then of course you have such classics as horse, high jumping, and long jumping. Since all the Mini-Games are 2 players, along with Racing and Freestyle, you're bound to find something you'll enjoy doing.

The difficulty of MX Superfly can get fairly tough but the learning curve is pretty forgiving in both the Racing and Freestyle Career modes. The real keys to blowing the competition away are learning to control your throttle (for Racing) and learning how to time your spring (in Freestyle). The most frustrating thing by far is when you are in a freestyle competition in a place like the golf course. You end up taking 2-3 minutes just looking for a ramp that can get you high enough to be competitive. The later races in Career mode can be killers, unless you can tweak out your speed, tilt, and powerslide perfectly on almost every turn, don't expect to catch 1st place.

You can choose to play a Racing or Freestyle exhibition match, a 2-player race, Freestyle, or Mini-Game, as well as the Career mode in either Racing or Freestyle. The basic controls are simple and exactly what you'd expect. The left stick steers, the R1 button is for used for power sliding, while the X and square buttons accelerate and brake respectively. The L1 button is used to stall your throttle for controlled bursts of speed. While on the ground the L2 and R2 buttons load up your spring for jumping, and in the air they are held down when you want perform tricks. The triangle, square, circle, and x buttons are used execute tricks in conjunction with either L2 or R2. My big gripe is with the saving function of Career mode. You have to manually select save game whenever you want to save your current career data, rather than it saving automatically after every event as it should.

MX Superfly is definitely an insanely fun ride at the start. However the repetitive nature of some of the game play will leave all but the hardcore bike fans bored after a few days; the only thing you're likely to play very often after a week is Freestyle mode.