Monster Energy Supercross 4 Beginner's Guide: Tips & tricks to guarantee success

Milestone's latest Supercross title has finally arrived.

We enjoyed what the official Supercross game has to offer and you can check out why in our review.

The races in Monster Energy Supercross 4 are relentlessly intense, so if you're new to the series, it can be a lot to adapt to.

Never fear though, we're here with our beginner's guide to get you off to the best possible start!

The right difficulty

When starting a new racing game, you need to make sure that the settings are configured correctly. MESX4's difficulty is no exception and you've got to get this right to ensure the races are the right level of challenge.

To change your difficulty settings when in your Career mode save, navigate to the "My Career" tab on the far right. Then go down to "Race options" and select this menu.

From there you can change everything from the length of races, to whether you're allowed rewinds and the AI difficulty. If you're new to Supercross or motorbike games as a whole, we recommend opting for Very Easy.

To find out which settings are best for you, you're best off playing an event outside of Career mode. If you're blowing the AI away, turn the difficulty up. If you're finding it too difficult, do the reverse.

Practice makes perfect

Let's say that you've been racing against the Very Easy AI and still struggling to win. There's no shame in this, as SX4 isn't an easy game, it's part of the attraction.

The best way to hone your skills on two wheels in SX4 is to spend some hours in the game's Time Attack mode. This can be accessed from the Single Player tab in the main menu.

This won't improve your skills when it comes to wheel-to-wheel racing, as there will only be yourself on-track.

Time Attack will help when it comes to the control you have over the bike and techniques such as jumps and drifting.

Hitting the track

Training is available right from the start of your career mode, so it's best to get into the habit before your first race.

There are five different sub-categories of training to carry out in MESX4. These are "The Lion", "The Surgeon", "The Showman", "The Lightning" and "The Snake".

Each subcategory focusses on a different aspect of motorcycle riding. In short, Lion centres on passing, Surgeon on racing line, Showman on jumps, Snake on speed and accuracy and Lightning on straight-line speed.

After each racing weekend, you get three attempts at passing these challenges. Once you've accrued a certain number of stars, you unlock special items.

You can see how far you are along by selecting unlockables while in the training menu (Triangle on PS, Y on Xbox).

Level up

Once you've got your skills points, it's only natural to want to spend them. To be the best in the business, you have to at least be three-quarters through most of these skill trees.

This sounds straightforward, but you'd be surprised how many people forget to improve their skills. This is key to improving your rider in your Career mode save.

To access the abilities trees, navigate to the My Rider tab in career mode and select "Abilities". From here you can choose to improve your cornering, physical resistance, scrub, braking and bike control.

Which is best to upgrade depends on you and what area you feel you could use help in, there isn't a one size fits all solution here.

You can see how this will affect your rider's stats by looking at the My Abilities screen on the right.

Second chance

We all make mistakes during races, there's absolutely no shame in it. This is something that Milestone has recognised with MESX4, as flashbacks are available in-game if you enable them.

Flashbacks allow you to rewind the clock and correct any mistakes that you may have made during the race.

You only have a limited number of these though (3) so only use them if you did something major like run off the circuit. Flashbacks can only take you back around ten seconds too, so don't wait around to activate one.

You need to press R1 on PlayStation or RB on Xbox to activate a flashback. You then pick the exact moment where you want to resume the action from.

Make sure that you go far enough back so that you can avoid the incident as once you've used a flashback, you can't re-use it.

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