Pocketbike Racer (Xbox)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.1 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Jeff Gerstmann
• Reviewed on: 12/04/2006
• Released on: 11/19/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: Pocketbike Racer (Xbox) Review

Pocketbike Racer is one of the three games being made available by Burger King as part of a limited-time promotion. The games are all available for $3.99--provided you also purchase some food. At a cost of four dollars, you get what you pay for, but the games do still have some inherent value, even if it's solely on an ironic level. On top of that, the limited-time nature of the deal means that these games might (but probably won't) be rare in the future. Pocketbike Racer is a Mario Kart-style racing game on tiny motorcycles that can fire a handful of different weapons. It's not so good.

Like any mascot kart-racing game, there are multiple characters to choose from in Pocketbike Racer, and these ones mainly come from the deep, deep pantheon of the Burger King library. Starting right at the top, you have the King himself, but there are others, like Whopper Jr., Subservient Chicken, and, uh, model-slash-TV-hostess Brooke Burke. From there, you choose a bike, each of which has ratings in three different statistics. You then race. The main mode is a very standard combat racing mode, where you want to finish first and can get ahead of your opponents by using your weapons. There are gates on the course that fill a weapon meter when you pass through them. As the meter fills, more weapons become available to you. The lowest level is a shield, but you can move up to a bottle rocket, firecrackers, a homing rocket, a flash bomb, and the disruptor, which reverses the controls of any target it hits. If you get more energy than you need, you can toggle the weapons back down to a lower-level item, but the controls for this are awkward. Other modes include a more combat-intensive battle royale, a cone slalom, a time trial, and a stripped-down mode that takes all the gates and weapons away for a pure race. There are multiple courses in the game, starting at a Burger King parking lot and progressing to a backyard level, a garden, and so on. The courses have a couple of shortcuts but are otherwise very generic. The racing, too, is very generic. The physics are floaty in that "this is a budget game" sort of way. Combined with the way your bike can occasionally get hung up on pieces of the level geometry, racing really isn't much fun.

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