Jeremy McGrath Offroad is a simple racer that does what it needs to do well and does very little wrong otherwise. In this nugget form, the quality shines and you can live with a couple of cracks on the surface.
There isn’t a whole lot of difference between Arcade Mode and Career in terms of depth. Arcade means that you just pick a car, a course, tweak the settings and off you go. Career means that the course is chosen with 23 in total and you unlock the next course upon completion of the one before. The type of car is already chosen for you and you just pick the model. After each race you gain XP depending on what difficulty you chose and what happened during the race. Hitting fences, signs and cacti will each boost your XP massively. Overtaking, long jumps and finishing well are the more common ways of slowly improving your level of XP.
When you achieve 1000 XP you are granted with a single block to distribute to your car settings and you can either pick from handling, top speed, acceleration or braking to improve. To be honest the majority of these blocks should be spent on acceleration in order to beat your competitors. Unlike other games where you boost attributes, you can really feel the difference in the car straight away and they’ve been able to achieve a really nice balance. The Career is split into sections where each one begins with a different class of car with absolutely zero upgrades. I completed the career on the medium difficulty and it was difficult to win the first couple of races for each class, although it was easier to win the rally tracks. One of the best things about this title is that the career is competitive throughout, rarely was I streets ahead of the AI. The courses are pretty well thought out and obstacles can get in the way of you, generally the overall racing design is pretty decent. However the obstacles do spoil the decent graphics somewhat by looking so out of place.
An annoyance which will occur during most races is a particularly odd camera angle. You can choose the usual camera angles during the race but when using the furthest third person angle, which you most likely will, during corners the camera can hang out to the side which creates a really nice and original perspective. The problem is that when back on the straight road the camera doesn’t move back to its original position which can make it very confusing as on the wrong course you won’t see the track because of it. So you have to manually budge it back in behind the car which can be quite tedious.
The game allows for online multiplayer with up to 8 players, unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a single game to take part in which was a shame. You race with a car of your choice from your collection with the upgrades already attached and because of how smooth the races are, I was honestly disappointed that I wouldn’t get the chance to show the Xbox Live community what I was made of. I would have liked to perform a little customisation on my cars and perhaps the ability to unlock different options in terms of design and colour instead of getting five or six options straight away. The majority of achievements you will get from being good at the game and during the completion of career mode, alongside a couple of hardcore ones thrown in for good measure.
I always feel bad when I don’t know who someone like McGrath is, especially someone who’s been as successful in his sport as Jez (I’ve completed his game, does that make us first name friends now?). With seven AMA Supercross titles under his belt and now a decent arcade game I just hope it gets given a chance at 800 MSP or $9.99 through the PSN, as some will really like this.