To date, 11 PlayStation 3 games have earned Play’s prestigious Classic Award. Of those 11, no less than three are off-road driving games – MotorStorm, Colin McRae: DiRT and Sega Rally. That’s a pretty impressive ratio. It was starting to look like the PlayStation 3 was truly at its best when covered in mud or, on a dry day, dust. But wait, before you go rolling your PlayStation 3 around the goal mouth of your local football pitch, or burying it in your mum’s flower bed, hear this: a generous coating of wet dirt is no longer a sure-fire guarantee of top-drawer PS3 performance. The latest off-road racer to arrive on our favourite big, black, shiny, alluringly curved box is less like mud, glorious mud and more like something else sloppy, sticky and brown. Curry? Peanut butter? Chocolate fudge sauce? Something like that, yeah.

So yes, MX Vs ATV Untamed falls a long way short of glory but, in all fairness, it isn’t total, er… fizzy gravy. For the most part it’s the very definition of okay, of acceptable, and of functional. But if you were to ask someone who had just burned around a mud track on a dirt bike, quad bike or a buggy how it was, you wouldn’t hear, “Hmmm, it was alright, I suppose”, you would get a lot of breathless whooping and high-fiving. This is because real dirt racing is very exciting and incredibly thrilling. MX Vs ATV Untamed, on the other hand, is not.

It is, very occasionally, fun. But only in a very short-lived, fairly sedate sort of way. Driving aimlessly around its large, hilly environments pulling off big jumps and stunts in Free mode is a bit of a giggle for a while, especially when using one of the more oddball vehicle types such as the mini-bikes, monster trucks or even monster golf carts. But the actual structured game modes, numerous though they might be, are mostly pretty boring and samey. The whole thing looks and feels very dated. The visuals are jaggy and pixilated, and there’s some truly horrible pop up at times. The physics seem decent at first, but after a while it becomes clear that there’s not enough middle ground between being totally in control and totally out of control. You’re either perfectly fine or you’ve crashed – you’re never just about hanging on by the skin of your teeth.

Finally, the sound is really terrible. Every vehicle sounds similar, like a hair dryer on defrost, and there are no collision sounds at all. Overall, it feels a bit like a ‘just do the bare minimum’ kind of effort. But just enough, just isn’t good enough.

Gavin Mackenzie