ATV Offroad Fury 4 - hands-on

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It's time to get muddy. Really muddy

Sophomore series ATV istearing the track up a little this year by adding MX bikes, buggies and trucks to the vehicle mix. If that's not enough, you'll alsoget a fleshed-out event list, clever point-to-point races, and PSP-to-PS2 online connectivity.

The majority of our hands-on time with ATV Offroad Fury 4 was spent on the point-to-point tracks, Baja-style, sending all four vehicle types around wide open maps and hunting down secret routes.While not asbig as, say, actual Baja, these routes are still muchlarger than any of the traditional courses. They're split into tracks designated either "universal" or exclusively for heavy or light vehicles.After digging into them for several hours, we can report that the point-to-point courses are definitely looking like the highlight of Offroad Fury 4.

The strategic advantages of taking an alternate course are arguable.It's not necessarily super-bright to take a dirt bike down a wide-open path where trucks are ripping it up, or to take a truck down the super-narrow, twisting paths designed for the light vehicles... but that doesn't mean it's not a lot of fun.Taking a truck off a jump designed for a bike is something that captures a lot of thedaredevil appeal of off-road driving, if not the competitive nature of it.

Since we were working with an early build of the game, the physics of the alternate vehicles didn't feel perfect yet, but the weight of the buggies and trucks feels totally acceptable.