Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator 2021 – Review

Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator is brought to us by Ultimate Games and developers Play2Chill Games, not to be confused with the popular Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 from PlayWay and developers Red Dot Games. It’s taken two years to arrive on consoles from it’s original PC release, so is it a polished beauty or a mangled wreck.

Anyone who’s played the Car Mechanic franchise will have a great idea of what to expect, you’ll manage your own garage, taking in vehicles requiring repairs and then you’ll neeed to unscrew and remove the problematic parts, head to the shop to purchase a replacement, then fix the new parts in place before finalising the job and taking the now repaired vehicle for a quick test drive before returning it to it’s owner.

If you’re fixing up cars, then you’ll be plaing Car Mechanic Simulator and if you’re repairing Motorcycles, you guessed it, you’ve found your way to Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator, otherwise the core gameplay is identical between the two titles, when you’re releasing a game that’s so similar to another, there’s going to be alot of comparisons and while the premise might be the same, it’s the actual presentation and implementation where Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator leaves a few screws lose.

While it’s name might suggest otherwise, the core gameplay, performance and graphics all sit much closer to the original Car Mechanic Simulator released on Xbox in 2019 and 2017 on PC, so we’re obviously looking at quite a dated base.
Add to this some aweful menu’s, which I’m sure work perfectly fine on PC, but here on Xbox, at least during our time with the game, which is listed as the final retail version, but does have “trial version” showing bottom right, regardless these issues leave the game in a near unplayable state, don’t worry, we’ll explain that fully a little later.

Back to the game, you’ll find 2 main modes, the career which forces you to work your way up from small jobs like replacing a tire and changing the oil, until you’ve built up enough money to expand your garage and tools to tackle tougher jobs like replacing major parts of the engine.
Whereas Sandbox mode takes off the reins and lets you free with unlimited money to expand as you wish. When starting off in career, there’s also a pretty in depth tutorial, but even at this early stage some major issues shine brighter than a brand new polished manifold.

Working through the tutorial, you start off tasked with a few simple repeairs, you’ll unscrew a few nuts and bolts and parts on the front wheel, to remove it ready to replace the tire, this all plays pretty straight forward, but after replacing the tire you then need to balance it, this means buying a new machine, so you head to the tablet and select the balancer machine to buy and place in your garage…. Except you don’t, becasue the menu system doesn’t seem to pick up your commands, so you’re sat there with the section highlighted, pressing every button and direction without any luck at all.
Eventually, after sitting and smashing every button in quick succesion like a toddler having a tantrum, the game sprung to life and allowed me to make selections, buy the machine and balance the tire.

II was then asked to take the bike for a test drive, so I head to the menu, had exactly the same issue and still couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so I went full “Middle of supermarket tantrum” and rage quite to restart and bypass the tutorial.

Obviously skipping the training isn’t the best way to start a career as a mechanic, so bypassing the tutorial left me equally confused, I continued to work through a few jobs, discovering a few more issues, such as being told I missed something, but then finding no clear indication of what it was or what I’m supposed to do with it. but again whenever I had to head into the menu, the exact same troubles returned, so it was on to the Sandbox mode to test that out.

The freedom to buy anything I wanted, but you guessed it, with the same menu system the same menu problems persisted. It’s fair to say when it works it’s not a bad mechanic simulator clone, there’s not as much detail as the popular Car Mechanic Simulator franchise, removing parts seems a little rushed as they dissapear into thin air. iI’s got potential for motorcycle fans, but they really need to work out the issues with the user interface before we could recommend it.

Overall presentation, both graphically and with audio, as you might have guessed, it’s an older game, so there’s minimal upgrades to make it feel anything near a next-gen title.
Many of the bikes are pretty well detailed, but the animations, your surrounding garage and the general texture quality all feels a step below the Car Mechanic sims, many of the clunks and clinks of replacing parts sound identical and if you do bypass the UI problems and get a bike out on the road, as well as some pretty standard driving controls and no real feel for speed, you will see it’s still struggling to match the competition both visually and in the sound department.

The real saving grace of Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator could be the price, at only £15 that’s almost £10 less than Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, but my own experience puts Motorcycle Mechanic Sim closer in quality and performance to the original Car Mechanic Simulator, which is only £8 in comparison.

So where does the value lie with Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator, for me it’s really hard to recommend, if you’re just after a Mechanic simulator, then Car Mechanic Simlator 2021 is a much better game and while the rrp at £25 might seem like a jump, it’s often found on sale (currently showing at only £17 in the Xbox store), but even at full price it’s easily worth the extra.

Compared to Car Mechanic Simulator or Car Mechanic Simulator Classic, they’re both lower priced, feel a little more advanced in presentation and aren’t plagued with the menu and UI issues we have with Motorcycle mechanic simulator.
If the issues get patched, then there’s certainly a home for Motorcycle fans, but anyone looking for the general Mechanic Simulator experience might be better off sticking with Car Mechanic Simulator 2021.

About Author