MotoGP 25 game fixes a 20-year problem

Racing games face an eternal problem: how do you balance out a desire to make the experience as realistic as possible while still keeping it fun to play? These are still meant to be games, after all.

It's a challenge that plagues almost every racing title, not helped by a usually vocal minority who think they know what 'simulation' is and seem to despise the idea of a game being accessible for those who aren't sat in dedicated gaming set-ups and willing to devote hours to hot-lapping just to hone their craft. 

Inevitably this debate will be a huge focus when the F1 25 game comes out later this year, but for now we can shift our attention to MotoGP's attempt, not only because MotoGP 25 is now available (impressively early in the year, we might add), but also because developer Milestone has tackled the simulation vs playability issue head on with this title, and it's nailed it.

For years the official MotoGP games have been a struggle. There's lots of features packed into each release, but it's easy to overlook that when most players would find it nearly impossible to do a single lap without crashing.

The quest for realism had gone too far. Brake too hard and the back of the bike would fly up into the air. Turn in with a fraction too much lean angle and you're falling off. Use a tiny bit too much brake as you're turning in, and - you've guessed it - you're falling off. We could go on…

As a fan of bike racing for three decades I understood the dynamics and real-world logic of why I was always crashing, but that didn't mean I could do anything about it. The margins were too fine, and it sucked the fun out of playing.

I couldn't play any of the previous titles in the series, including MotoGP 24 which I picked up on the cheap at Christmas, without adding all of the rider aids. And even then, the experience was clunky. You couldn't ride smoothly once you had all the assists on, because the way they all kicked in seemed too abrupt. 

It was a struggle, and one most players would only persist with if they had a strong enough devotion to MotoGP that they really wanted to experience it in a virtual world. 

But for 2025 that's all changed. Milestone caught the eye with an announcement earlier this year that it was introducing a new 'arcade experience' for players who "want to get right into the action without forgetting authenticity" with a simplified handling model.

While the world 'arcade' makes many turn their noses up, if this could be done right, it felt like a feature that could open this game up to the many players who have tried it in the past and never gone back.

So has it been done right? Having played the game extensively in the couple of days leading up to its release, our verdict is a resounding yes.

The arcade experience isn't completely alien to what bike racing should be about. You have to have some sort of understanding about braking distances and motorbike racing lines to produce any sort of speed over a lap.

But the key difference is that while trying to work all of that out, you can brake hard and crank the bike over onto its side, and you don't instantly fall off. Players who have been spooked by MotoGP games in the recent past will no longer feel that way the first time they fire up the 2025 edition.

Sure, if you want to be quick, you're going to need to understand a bit about modulating the brakes and managing how much you lean into the corners. And there seem to be some corners where if you brake at the same time as the AI opponents, you will run wide, while at others you'll be just fine. That's not a deal breaker though, as you just have to learn which corners you can attack more than others while the game looks after you more than it has in the past.

The main thing is, if you just want to charge around the tracks you've seen on TV on a red Ducati and rub elbows and fairings with the best in the business, you now can.

The arcade handling doesn't go as far as the early 2000s Namco MotoGP titles, so you can't flip-flop the bike as if it doesn't weigh anything. But those games were at least accessible and fun to play and, over the last two decades since Namco stopped making the games, the quest to create realistic bike handling has taken a lot of the fun out of the virtual MotoGP experience.

Finally, it feels like we are back on a path towards opening this series up to many more people who would love to play a MotoGP game.

What else you need to know

Having established that the on-track offering makes MotoGP 25 worth playing, here's our take on some of the other key features of the game: 

As always the career mode offers plenty of depth and customisation options. You can run full or part seasons, and choose to start in any of Moto3, Moto2 or MotoGP. And when you race in the top class, sprint races are optional.

The usual 'choose a rival' option crops up every few races, and while this always feels like a bit of a needless feature in racing game career modes, this version has been tweaked, as the rival you choose will change the benefit you get from beating them. You can choose to just boost your reputation, go after an opponent whose seat you'd like to steal in future, or focus on earning more development focus from your team to speed up the progression of your bike.

On the bike development front, a new feature is the chance to debrief with your engineer after each weekend. You can feed back on which parts of the bike you think are weak, or choose to let the team steer the development path. You might also be told what your team-mate wants to improve, or (and this is a nice touch) if you are riding a satellite bike you can be told what the lead works rider is trying to develop. 

The development race in the MotoGP class is a bit on the wild side. Performance between the manufacturers can dramatically shift after any of the in-season tests. For example, after one test we suddenly had LCR Honda jumping up the order, which turned Johann Zarco into a contender for race wins, and made Somkiat Chantra a solid midfield runner…

After the next test the factory Ducatis slid back slightly so they were no longer fighting for wins by the end of the year, and at the start of the next season we had a works Honda 1-2 on the grid, with Pecco Bagnaia and Marc Marquez 16th and 18th on their Ducatis.

It's all a bit chaotic and unrealistic, and personally it's a bit too all over the place. But if you embrace it, it's quite fun to see fortunes fluctuate so quickly.

The active rider market is back again in career mode, and you have the option to enable it from the very start of your career rather than the end of the first season. The fact that riders can move up from Moto3 and Moto2 makes this feel nicely dynamic, and at the end of our first season nothing too out of the ordinary happened. The most eye-catching move was Honda reuniting old Suzuki team-mates Alex Rins and Joan Mir, who claimed that 1-2 on the grid for the season opener that we mentioned earlier! 

A new feature this year is the 'Race off' mode, where you can take part in 'training' races on different bikes, just like many of the real world riders do. You can race off-road Flat Tracks, agile Minibikes or Motards.

In our view this is a bit of a gimmick. There's only a couple of track locations and, once the novelty of trying them out has passed, we've not been going back to them, even when they crop up as optional rider development events in between GPs during career mode.

One final observation: while we applaud the efforts to create a handling model that will enable many more players to quickly get to grips with MotoGP action, one oversight is the fact that there's no quick qualifying mode.

Qualifying has to involve both Q1 and Q2 sessions, or taking part in practice to go straight to Q2. A single lap, or single session qualifying option like most other games have should be high up the list for the future.

That's a minor gripe though. As a player who has persisted through the unwieldy handling model of many MotoGP games over the last 20 years, it feels good to at last have one where I can get stuck in and have some fun.