by Jed Pressgrove
Too often games are praised for having a lot of “content,” a word that hatefully reduces ideas and work to the stuffing of a product. ATV Renegades, an update of the Nintendo DS and 3DS game ATV Wild Ride, rejects the trend of cramming everything you can into a game, sporting a workmanlike, bare-bones approach that recalls the great shooter Earth Defense Force 2017. On one hand, ATV Renegades doesn’t come close to the multifaceted brilliance of 2001’s ATV Offroad Fury, which did as much justice to stadium races as it did to outdoor roaming. Yet it’s fun to play a game that modestly and humorously knows its place in 2017, the year of overblown pop epics (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn).
Although developer Renegade Kid (now defunct) could be criticized for not including an exploration mode that recognizes the idle-play culture that surrounds four-wheelers, ATV Renegades works fine as three racing modes: Free Race, World Tour, and Time Trial. World Tour is the best, with each tour lining you up against five other ATV riders on four tracks across the globe. To advance to a new tour, you have to accumulate enough points to attain first place at the end of a tour, a la Mario Kart. The tracks cover countries ranging from Russia to England, with scenic features (snow, castles, etc.) making each national spot distinctive and other sights, like a rusty ship and jet streams, bringing general life to the proceedings. With reverse versions of both regular and extended tracks, ATV Renegades does a good job of keeping you off-guard throughout the tours despite only six countries being represented.
One of the keys to winning lies in the relationship between tricks and nitro boosts. All of the tracks will send you flying via ramps at some point, and while in midair, you can perform a short, medium, or long trick to fill up your nitro-boost bar to varying degrees. Learning what type of trick you have time to do is essential, as you only have three laps to complete on most tracks; any devastating crash or well-timed boost can mean the difference between 10 points (first place) and no points (fifth or sixth place). Risks must be taken because if you aren’t doing tricks (each one only takes one press of a button), you will more than likely hear an opponent yell “Whoooo!” as they zip by you during his or her own boost.
You also aren’t going to win if you don’t take turns as close to the corners as possible, but taking this risk means you have to avoid losing momentum by running your four-wheeler up a hill or, worse, ramming into something hard and flipping over. Another challenge is steering your four-wheeler while airborne when you see that the track is turning so that you move with the road after you land, as opposed to crashing into a wall. Even though the steering in ATV Renegades isn’t as tight as it was in ATV Offroad Fury, the more arcade-like style is exciting and funny, especially when you watch computer-controlled riders make seemingly human mistakes, such as failing to steer away from other landing riders and causing nasty collisions (the sound effects are laughably loud and generic).
The different ATVs have their own handling, top speed, and acceleration, but the riders you choose are only diverse on the surface and have no backstories. Their trite monikers — Simon Jeremy, Travis Wylde, Jose Lopez, Lily Sage, etc. — give a comedic slant to the races. It’s unusual such things would motivate one to play more, but after all, who wants to lose to some dolt named Simon Jeremy while listening to crappy punk and nu metal? ATV Renegades’ dubious appeal, along with its sheer simplicity, makes for a purer thrill than counting all the hours one spends with a game that desperately hopes all the crap it throws at audiences will seem profound.
Game Bias 
One comment