MotoGP 25 Review: Small Improvements, But Nothing Groundbreaking

With five real-life rounds already in the books, MotoGP 25 lines up on the virtual grid for bike racing fans to enjoy. What have Milestone brought to the table this year for two-wheel-racing enthusiasts? Let's find out in our review.

Images (8): Milestone

It’s been a great week or so for games. We’ve had a great new RPG, Clair Obscur, launch, we’ve had a classic RPG in Oblivion being remastered, but the most exciting of all - the BikePG MotoGP25 has just launched. It may not have the most exciting list of new content I have ever seen, but I was pretty impressed by what it does right. Let’s have a look at MotoGP 25!

The game will feature multiplayer racing, including crossplay from Day 1 across PC, Playstation 4/5 and Xbox One/Series X|S, but not Nintendo Switch. Ranked races, and LiveGPs make a return as well.
I’ve been playing MotoGP 25 for the last week or so, and I should say I also played a fair bit of MotoGP 24 and its predecessors. Additionally, I already went offroad on two wheels with Monster Energy Supercross 25 recently for our review.

MotoGP 25: Three New Classes​

Anyway, one of the main features that was added to this years MotoGP game is a few new disciplines for your rider to get stuck into between their Grand Prix rounds. These are Minibikes, Motard, and Flat Track. You get to race these in two different locations - and they’re honestly not groundbreaking, but they don’t feel terrible to play, either. It’s definitely a way to mix up your riding experience and to improve your skills as well.



The easiest of these is Minibikes, and they really just handle like a tiny little MotoGP bike with a lot of understeer. They’re kind of fun, but not too exciting.



Motard is the intermediate option - these are sort of motocross style bikes on an asphalt track. I found these fun sliding with just a bit of slip angle on asphalt. It's not easy, but you’re not super sideways - I found this one the most fun for me.



The Flat Track bikes, on the other hand, I found really difficult. They’re dirt bikes on a flat dirt race track, and they get really sideways. It actually reminds me of sprint car racing: You get the bike into a corner on a slide, and it’s all about throttle control. You use the throttle to control the angle of the bike in the corner - not the steering. It’s very Lightning Mcqueen, really. And I did find it rewarding to get it right, although it took me many laps to do that. I can see people completely zenning out to this, but it’s not easy to reach that point.

MotoGP 25 Career Mode: What's New?​

These new bike categories weave their way into the career mode a little like how the old Supercar challenges did in the Codemasters F1 games. Talking about the career mode, Milestone tweaked a fair amount of it this year. It’s not a complete overhaul, but they made some changes that improved the experience for me.

Career Mode Challenges​

For starters, the Career Mode plays out as a series of 1v1 challenges with different riders, where you need to finish ahead of them over a series of races to get rewards. These can include beating your teammate to become the #1 rider for your team, or beating another team’s rider, so that a manufacturer starts respecting you more.

In MotoGP 24, you were told who you were racing, but in MotoGP 25, you get to choose what challenge you want to take on. Do you want to get strategic and try to become team leader? Or would you rather just build rep by taking on other teams? It's your call.

Upgrades & Testing​

Along with this, Milestone has redone how upgrades work across the manufacturers. Each manufacturer now has a rating, which indicates how many upgrades they can receive. MotoGP has a limit on how much testing teams can do and changes to bikes they can make to encourage development from the slower manufacturers. It’s similar to the scaling wind-tunnel time in F1, and this rating simulates this in the game.

You get a limited amount of upgrades you can try in each official test. New in MotoGP 25 is that you can customise each upgrade of the bike for the test. For example, I knew I wanted the power increase that my team offered me, and not the fuel delivery, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted the handling or stability increase on top of that. So I could leave the engine the same in both bikes, but swap out the frame in each one at the pre-season test, which now takes place in Thailand.

Telemetry again exists in this game, but as far as I could tell, you can’t really make much use of it. It doesn’t show the difference in laptime between laps that you’re comparing, so you can see that you braked later on one lap, and got a worse exit - but was it faster time-wise, or slower? You can’t work it out, which I found negated the whole point of the telemetry.

The Engineer's Turn​

New this game, after each grand prix is a debrief with your team and race engineer. They ask you where the bike needs work and will steer development in that direction - a good feature! I generally like the conversational way of dealing with the bike in these games. The previous games had this as well, but making setup changes is way more fun when you come in - tell your engineer that you’re having difficulty with oversteer on throttle, exiting a corner - and they’ll go ahead and make what changes they think will help. You can make changes manually yourself, but I think the guided way is much better.

MotoGP 25 Physics​

On the topic of riding the bikes, I found this year’s game generally similar to MotoGP 24, but a bit easier in a few ways.

The MotoGP bikes feel generally a lot more stable this year. There were two main things I was struggling with last year, both the death wobble when coming off the throttle or brake and turning at the same time - and lifting the rear wheel off the ground under heavy braking.

Both these things are much less of an issue in MotoGP25: I found it a lot easier to smoothly come off the throttle without the bike trying to just throw me off. It’s generally more stable into corners as well, but I found it did still want to break free on exit with wheelspin. There was also less wheelies that I noticed as well.

This is all talking about the Pro mode though. Because new to this year is the Arcade mode physics - and honestly really surprising to me, I found Arcade mode to be really good.

Arcade Mode & Riding Aids​

MotoGP games have been very hard the last couple of years. Under brakes and on throttle, you are always on the edge of adding too much right trigger and throwing your rider into the air, or just slightly too much left trigger and lowsiding. It’s stressful, and often makes the game not super fun to play, as you’re not focusing on apexes, and lines. You’re just focussing on not falling off the bike, which makes it hard to really get into the game.

And this is where Arcade mode jumps in. I was kind of expecting it to give the bikes insane grip, a bit like in the old NAMCO MotoGP games. But it doesn’t: The bikes still take ages to stop, and still understeer like a boat - it just doesn’t try to kill you. Basically it’s a mode where you can’t fall off the bike.



Arcade mode removed so much stress from playing this game, and I found I was just focusing on treating it more like Gran Turismo or something similar - focusing on braking points, lines, and exits.

It’s maybe slightly embarrassing for me, but I almost just keep running with Arcade mode on - I had such a good time with it, and you can run this mode throughout the entire game. It is possible turn it on and off whenever you want between races as well in Career Mode. However, the frustrating thing is it removes elements like tire wear and fuel burn - I’d love to see Milestone introduce ways to keep that on, but just turn off the pro mode physics.

Like in the previous game there’s a heap of neural riding aids available, plus a number of really good accessibility options. They include the ability to turn the game speed down and one-hand controls, which are really good additions.

MotoGP 25 Visuals & Sounds​

This year’s game is the first in Unreal Engine 5, and I think it looks generally pretty good - but it’s not a huge difference to last year’s game. It does have all the updated MotoGP overlay graphics and sounds as well - and I think they actually look a lot better in this game than what I thought when I first saw them in real life.

The new more “cool” sounding theme song makes an appearance as well. It took me a few weeks to get around it, but honestly I think it's great - the most fun theme at the moment, better than the previous version, or the F1 theme.

Sound wise, Milestone put a heap of work in with Dorna and Audio Technica this year completely redoing the sounds of the bikes. I think they sound beefy, and a lot better - with more backfiring and details.

2025 Season Content​

Of course all the riders and bikes from 2025 will be included in this game. Alongside MotoGP, I found the Moto2 bikes a bit easier to ride than last year - they have a lot of grip and still sound insanely loud.

The Moto3 bikes I honestly found harder to drive than in MotoGP 24. It felt like I was getting way more wheelspin on throttle in 25.

New tracks that are in the game this year include Balaton Park in Hungary. This one’s owned by Chanoch Nissany - if anyone remembers that name. The Israeli made headlines in 2005 when running a free practice session for Minardi at the Hungarian Grand Prix - not just for being the first Israeli in an official F1 session, but also for running almost seven seconds off the pace of teammate Christijan Albers and not being able to get out of his car after spinning out because he could not release the steering wheel.

Anyway, back to Balaton Park It’s an interesting track with lots of chicanes, and very flat. I’m not the biggest fan, but it is fine. Let’s see if it actually ends up getting raced though.


Image: racingcircuits.info

I drove the Sokol Circuit in Kazakhstan, and the KymiRing in Finland - which both never got raced in real life. Poor Milestone keep making these tracks in MotoGP games that never get finished. At least the Buddh Circuit ended up getting used, even if it had snakes everywhere.

Also returning in this year’s game is Brno, a classic MotoGP track. It’s fun, it’s flowy, it’s on the side of a big hill. Good track!

My final point on tracks is that Phillip Island still has trees on the outside of Siberia (Turn 5) blocking the ocean, which is an absolute crime as they are not there anymore in real life.

Verdict​

I had a good time playing MotoGP25. If we compare it to the previous game, I don’t think there’s some brand new feature or game mode that really breaks the game open. It’s definitely more on the iterative side of releases - but what it does iterate on it does a really good job with.

The changes to career mode, the physics updates, and the sound just make this game a way better game to play that MotoGP 24. I can’t see myself going back, as this definitely feels like a much better game than last year.

That being said, there’s nothing hugely different in this year’s game - it’s just a lot of little improvements. So if you’re trying to save money, and you still have MotoGP 24 sitting around, you’re not missing out in too much if you want to give this one a miss.

I won’t be, I’ll be playing it for the next few weeks. And for that, I give MotoGP 25 a 4 out of 5.

What are your thoughts on MotoGP 25, and did you find our review helpful? Let us know in the comments below and join the discussion in our MotoGP forum!