Despite giving off early-2000s extreme sports cash-grab vibes, Downhill Domination actually holds up today as a really fun time.
What Is It? Downhill Domination is a 2003 PlayStation 2 extreme mountain bike racing game. Players start at the top of a series of suspiciously steep mountain racing trails and kick, punch, jump, and peddle their way to the finish line.
The first thing that stands out when playing Downhill Domination is the speed. The game does a great job of conveying the ridiculously fast speeds these bikes would move traversing down the incredibly steep terrain the game takes place on. This places an incredible importance on controls. Always vital in racing games, the controls have to be responsive when the bikes move as fast as they do here. Thankfully, Downhill Domination answers the call with strong controls.
You will hold X to peddle, with a double tap followed by holding X triggering a sprint. Spriting burns your energy, but obviously lets you move faster for as long as your energy lasts. Steering is responsive and there is a nice balance of how sharp of turns you can make with and without holding that peddle button. There is also a sharp turn/brake button, but I did not find myself using it much at all after experimenting with it early on.
You will need sharp steering because the courses are absolutely packed with obstacles. Most of them take place in wilderness with trees and rocks providing most of the impediments. Running into just about anything will result in a costly crash, as will running off of the race area. The course design really shines throughout. They all feel absolutely chaotic at first glance, but regardless of which route you take, even those that don’t look like actual routes at all, will funnel you in the right direction; down the hill.
In addition to obstacles galore and countless alternate routes, each course is packed with jumps. Jumps enable the last major mechanical component of the game; tricks. Using the shoulder buttons, you can trigger dozens of different tricks when you go airborne. Flips, spins, grabs, supermans, and so on. This is not Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but there is an impressive variety of moves to discover.
Throughout races you can pick up power-ups which will have a variety of effects. Restoring energy, an instant, massive speed boost, point multipliers, or upgrading your attack. Speaking of attack, you can knock nearby racers off of their bikes. This starts as a basic, weak punch, but can be upgraded a few times into a strong stick or even a set of bottles you can use to throw at bikes in front of you. This attack will upgrade as you score points and pick up certain power ups. This is not the more important mechanic in the game, but it’s a small, fun addition to add to the already chaotic affairs.
The primary game mode is Career. There are few varieties, such as picking out only the Mountain courses (which are the shorter, bumpier courses) or racing through all 24 tracks in the game. Finishing near the top of a career race will earn points, earn enough points and you will advance to the next race. Races can range from under one minute long to up to four+, depending on the track. On top of career, you can unlock some other modes such as Moshbowl and Super Jump. Moshbowl is a destruction derby-like mode where you try to knock other bikers off of their rides in a small, bowl-like arena. Super Jump puts you on a massive ramp to see how many trick points you can score in one jump.
The game looks fine, nothing spectacular but it is all entirely functional. It is littered with of-the-era advertisements including Mountain Dew, PowerBar, and an upstart online bookstore named Amazon dot com. Wild times.
The Best Part: There is more depth to this as a pure racing game than it appears at first glance. Most of the races in the Super Career are fairly easy, but there are some near the end which get pretty tough even if you’ve upgraded your bike as much as possible along the way. It was here that I learned about the hidden mechanics of a free speed boost when you land a jump on the downslope of a landing area. In order to hit these, you will have to use the manual jump button to control your jumps and landings. This is a very minor thing that I spent 15+ races not knowing about, but it was the only way I was able to win some of these late races where the CPU riders were really tough. This is a minor thing, but also a completely unexpected bit of depth in an arcade style bike racing game.
The Worst Part: Some of the track layouts feel aggressively mean. Much of the game is based on tight windows through obstacles with quick twitch reactions needed to stay upright, but every now and then a spot will show up which I felt like I had no chance of successfully navigating. Like when there are cars doing both ways down a street with no area to the sides to go around. I know that, for the vast majority of these, there is probably an alternate route I could have found to avoid them, but that doesn’t make my eyes roll any less when I do end up in one of these sections.
The Verdict: Most of the courses in Downhill Domination feature a massive jump near the end. On more than a few occasions I had races clearly won heading into this final jump but I could not help but try to pull off a crazy backflip, superman, bar sit trick move only to crash and finish somewhere below first. It says a lot about the game that I felt compelled to risk winning simply for the sake of trying to do something completely unnecessary but undeniably cool.
The era was littered with every type of extreme sports title you could imagine. Downhill Domination seems like a drop in the sea with its generic characters, ridiculous soundtrack, corporate sponsors, and attitude. Diving into it for the first time over 20 years after it was released, I was not expecting much. I was delighted to be proven wrong as Downhill Domination is a really good racing game that enhances some really fun peripheral mechanics such as tricks and punching the racer next to you.
Downhill Domination is a great, fast bike racing game. It is still quite cheap on the PlayStation 2 and worth seeking out if the genre interests you at all.
How to Play: PlayStation 2
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