Mavrix is a promising sim about riding pushbikes down dangerously steep hills, but it shows the limits of open world design
Mavrix by Matt Jones is an early access mountain biking game with a 100-square-kilometre open world. It shares a lot in common with Descenders and Riders Republic. The former, because it’s about riding pushbikes at blistering high speeds down ludicrously dangerous hills, and the latter because all this is conducted in a big open world. Mavrix is promising, but it has a way to go before it can be recommended to anyone except the desperately bike-game-starved among us.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: who the heck is Matt Jones? He’s a mountainbike “slopestyler” from England whose YouTube channel has amassed over a million subscribers, mostly because it’s fun to watch a guy do dangerous things on bikes. I’m not sure if he’s to biking what Tony Hawk is to skating, but he’s a big deal. That’s why the game is named after him.
Despite Jones—an IRL biker—being a mascot of sorts, Mavrix manages to be accessible and arcade-y, while adding some elements that more technically minded riders will appreciate. For starters, front and back brakes are assigned to the left and right triggers respectively. Similarly, the left analog stick steers the bike, while the right stick shifts the position of the rider’s body. This is meant to provide more granular control, especially at high speeds and while performing mid-air tricks.
If you’re like me and are drawn to Mavrix because you sank hundreds of hours into Descenders, you may be surprised to hear that this newer game is a little more forgiving when it comes to falling off your bike. Indeed, the physics in general seem… unrealistic, and skewed in favour of the rider. This has some benefits: it’s possible to lightly brush a rock and not go hurtling through the air, and if I hit the side of a cliff at low speed, I’m not going to become amusingly tangled between the top and down tubes like I often do in Descenders’ unforgiving take on biking.
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On the other hand, there were occasions when I plummeted off a sheer cliff and, somehow, managed to survive the plummet by quickly bouncing off the cliff face and re-maneuvering mid-air. This is fun, but—and maybe I’m wrong here—it doesn’t feel like the “authentic physics” the game is going for.
Exploration is meant to be an important part of Mavrix, but I think it could do without it. The map sprawls with hectic descents, and the idea is to find an official track going down, and then to catch a chairlift to get back up. Once you’ve found and completed an official track, it’s unlocked for multiplayer attempts. Finding them isn’t hard per se: paths lead to them, as do signs, though the latter are extremely hard to parse on a fast-moving bike.
Aside from these chairlifts, which take me back to fixed points at the top of the hills, there’s no fast travel in Mavrix. This is probably because the devs want me to go out and explore, but I don’t want to explore on a pushbike, especially along flat or ascending roads at around 50km per hour. It’s slow and boring, and the world, while really pretty when it’s rolling by at high speed, isn’t very interesting at a Sunday drive pace. Exploration works in games like Riders Republic because instead of pedalling from one landmark to another, I can get there in a wingsuit, or an ATV.
The exploration in Mavrix is funny when it’s not annoying. It’s cute when I’m riding slowly along a country road and some blistering psytrance reaches its crescendo (yes, there is licensed music). It’s far less cute when the end of a track takes me to a chairlift many, many kilometres away from the one that leads me back up the hill towards the track I want to take on next. This is a real momentum killer, and I hope the team at Third Kind Games is able to implement fast travel sooner rather than later.
The good news is that the actual tracks, once I get on them, are brilliantly fun. Mavrix doesn’t waste much time demanding a modicum of technical know-how, and even early tracks require me to bunny hop between platforms and land some truly hectic jumps. I’m definitely not very good at this game yet, but I already feel the compulsion to fine-tune my attempts, all the better to climb the leaderboards. I just wish there wasn’t so much messing around between my attempts.
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There are various sponsors whose interest I can pique based on my performance out on the slopes, and there’s a cosmetics shop where I can use in-game currency to buy fancy gloves or helmets. I can buy the in-game currency with real world money, but I won’t gain any advantage because nothing improves my bike, only my appearance. There’s also invite-based multiplayer, which means I can roll around the huge map with friends or pre-arranged online people. Otherwise, if I’m connected to the internet the world is populated with randoms, who it’s fun to watch fall off cliffs and into lakes.
Should you play Mavrix right now? I think mountain bike enthusiasts, generally starved of good games about their sport, should feel confident diving in right now. The performance was decent on my aging RTX 3060 / Ryzen 5 5600H laptop, with a mix of low and medium settings, and I didn’t encounter any egregious bugs or crashes. It’s stable, in other words. As a more casual fan of biking games, I think I’ll wait until the game’s had a little more time in the oven, or at least, until it implements fast travel.
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