Machogames: PBR Out Of The Chute Shows Rodeo Might Not Trasfer Well To The Console

Here at Machochip headquarters, we don’t typically watch very much rodeo. Sure, we love to check out viral videos of the bull losing its mind and heading into the crowd, but we’re typically not tuning in to check out the winner of the bull riding title.
But the Professional Bull Riders tour, or PBR for short, is one of the fastest growing sports in the United States today. And nothing quite signifies that a sport has arrived on the national scene then it’s own video game. Crave Entertainment’s PBR Out of the Chute brings the action of the rodeo to the console, allowing players to take control of either the rider or, in an interesting twist, the bull.
Should you saddle up?

Since we’re next-gen system people around these parts, we took the Nintendo Wii version of the game for a spin. To be honest, we found the controls to be a bit difficult to master. To deal with the rider or the bull required tilt the Wii-mote this way or that way, and it always seemed to us like the controls were not doing what we desired, unless we were pushing buttons.
The graphic here aren’t that great either, since the only difference between one ring and another, for the most part, are some of the background graphics. But graphics aren’t what keeps us playing, gameplay is. And the gameplay is too short to be a lot of fun.
The key issue here is that bull riding is a sport based on an eight second timer. If the rider stays on the bull for that amount of time, then the round is over. This really makes the game move fast, almost too fast to be entertaining. There is a mode that allows for the open-ended timing of a bull ride, but that only means the difference between an eight second ride and a 30 second ride, which is not that much of a difference at all.
We do like the idea of being able to control the bull. In fact, we found trying to buck off a rider to be more entertaining than working to stay on the bull. Still, there wasn’t enough here to keep us interested for more than a few minutes. We most enjoyed this game when we were playing a human opponent, one of us as the bull and another as a rider. Competition can make anything good, and this was some fun for a few turns. But, as a whole, we just don’t think the very quick action of the PBR tour is conducive to a video game, at least not yet.
The game is cheap, however, so if you’re a big fan of the rodeo, you won’t have to drop a lot of coin to make this game work for you.
Available for the Wii for $29.99. A Playstation 2 version costs just $14.99.