American Chopper 2: Full Throttle

You’re on the hot seat and Paul Sr. wants it done now!

NA release: 22nd November 2005
JP release: N/A
EU release: N/A
Developer: Creat Studios
Publisher: Activision
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

American Chopper is a show where a group of people (including a dad and his sons) build bikes for various different customers, such making bikes for specific events, for the police, for various companies and so on. The focus is entirely on the design and building of the motorbikes – sort of like a Pimp My Ride style show-off than a challenge-based affair like Scrapheap Challenge.

Naturally, the video game has very little focus on designing your own bike. At the stat of the game, you only have one option in most categories (and none in others), so all you can do is add a bit of colour to those parts (no freedom to create actual imagery). You unlock parts extremely slowly, and you’ll pretty much just want to use your latest unlocks to get better stats. In short, the creation side may as well not exist.

So all you have is a bunch of challenges (six for each of the four characters) that mainly consist of collecting some items and then competing in a race. The handling is quite atrocious but the computer-controlled racers are bad enough that it doesn’t matter. The missions don’t last long, and the game is very short as a result.

The most interesting mission is one where you have to take out your rival (he bought the last of a particular part you need), steal his stuff and then escape form the police by heading home. You’re just given a general direction for this, so it’s easy to accidentally go the long way round. The map is a fairly small open world map, but you can never actually explore it, just use different parts of it for the challenge. It’s really bad.

Poor

American Chopper really is a difficult game to recommend or discourage. On one hand, the experience in the shop is great. There are tons of ways to customize bikes, and every character has their own storyline that keeps the game feeling like the show. Models look great, and production value is strong. On the other hand, however, is the gameplay, which feels like a clunky version of GTA.
Mark Bozon, IGN

Remake or remaster?

Nothing for this.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to buy American Chopper 2: Full Throttle