Pumped BMX Pro

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Game Details

Title: Pumped BMX Pro
Developer: Yeah Us!, Warp Digital Entertainment
Publisher: Curve Digital
Website: http://www.curve-digital.com/en-gb/games/detail/43/pumped-bmx-pro/
Genre: Sport, Arcade
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Audience: 3
Release Date: 07/02/19
Price: £14.99 – Rapid Reviews UK were very kindly provided with a review code for this title.

What the Developers say

Pumped BMX Pro puts you back on the seat for another high adrenaline, fast-paced trickathon where chaining massive combos could put you at the number one spot on the global leaderboards.

Pump your way through 60 levels of ever increasing difficulty, making sure you’re racking up those platinum medals by completing Trick Challenges along the way.

Choose from 15 riders with predesigned bikes, or get creative and design your own in the easy to use bike designer.

Pumped BMX Pro features;

15 characters, each with their own spectacular bike!
40+ radical tricks, from outrageous spins to insane grinds!
Over 200 challenges, each harder than the last!
60 beautifully designed levels, from high top mountains to swampy depths!
Ragdoll physics, just in case you miss the ramp!

https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Pumped-BMX-Pro-1506023.html#Overview

Introduction

When I was younger, I was an avid mountain biker, dirt paths where my roads and finishing a twenty-mile bike ride was such a joy. Also, I am a massive gamer; there was not much in the offering of mountain bike games. There was however Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2, hands down one of the best BMX games made to date -Not as if there are lots of them- and yes BMX XXX, was dire before anyone bring that one up. The game was an open area trick-filled BMX game it was loads of fun, and the music was terrific as far as sports games go Dave Mirra, and Blitzball (FFX) is my limit.

I saw Pumped BMX Pro instantly I was brought back to the glory days of playing Dave Mirra with my friends. So Rose tinted glasses on, I jumped right in. Oh, what a mistake, the glasses were thrown in the bin, and the childlike glee died within me.

Audio & Visual

Where to begin, the music is all-in-all half decent. However, it becomes repetitive very quickly with the number of times the courses will need to be replayed. It would have been nice for a few songs to break up the track that was good to start with, but after about five courses it was getting on my nerves, and I had to turn the volume was off.

Sound effects did the job, sounds like you were on a BMX bike, now and then the rider would shout “Woohoo” or “Yeah!” With the audio off, it makes no impact on gameplay as the game shows everything the player needs to know visually.

Pumped BMX Pro takes a more cartoon approach with the visual style. The courses are bright reasonably decent looking, but look not to bad. With the 2.5D set up for the stages there is enough detail to show the player what biome they are currently in but, in no means does Pumped BMX Pro push the Switch graphically.

The riders are all real professionals, a few I watched on TV while competing at X-games. Well, the only reason I know they are professionals was due to seeing the names of a couple of riders. The in-game, models look nothing like their real-life counterparts. The BMX they self look cool enough, and it is possible to give them a custom paint job. Huge annoyance from a biker, no one peddles, and the bike speeds up, this annoyed me.

Gameplay & Replayability

Going into Pumped BMX Pro, I was expecting more than what was offered. I wanted a Tony Hawks games with BMXs. What you get is a Trials game’s little brother — simple mechanics, easy to learn, hard to master.

I played through the whole 60 levels with many restarts from failed tricks. It felt as if something was missing, not sure, but it didn’t feel right in. I enjoyed my time with the game after I accepted that it was not what I’d hoped for and saw it for what it is, a poor man’s Trial game.

The game does a decent job of explaining the controls and lets you play a whole course with a tutorial. But even then it gets annoying if you restart the course, the tutorial will also reset. It would be nice if it played once and there was an option to show it again. The controls are easy, press the A button to “pump”, let go at the jump to get air, pressing A again will speed the free fall for more speed. The RZ button makes the bike do a 360, and the bulk of the tricks are locked to the R stick.

Here is where the problems begin, there are 8 tricks mapped to the directions on the stick. At times I pushed what I thought was one trick, but the rider did another trick as it read it as a different direction. There are also three sets of tricks that need to be manually swapped and are reset after each trick back to the first set of tricks, it worked well, but I would have liked to have seen a way to keep the sets active.

Pumped BMX Pro has a ton of replayability once the fiddly controls are figured out. Each of the 60 courses has challenges to complete as well as a score to reach to get a star rating. There’s also a course specific leaderboard where the top scores are on show. This allows for plenty of replays if you are the type of person who wants to be the best.

Conclusion

Pumped BMX Pro is a fairly decent game that offers a lot of gameplay if you are into these types of games. It does have some tricky controls to get to grips with. The problems I stated are nothing but a minor annoyance. With 60 levels, some considerably more challenging than others, there is plenty to keep you busy.

Rapid Reviews UK Rating

You can purchase Pumped BMX Pro from the Nintendo eShop on the following link, https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Pumped-BMX-Pro-1506023.html#Overview