MotoGP 26 review: a season update with small wins but mounting annual release fatigue

Whether or not you’re into bikes, MotoGP 26 is a racing game series you should play. The raw, ruthless challenge of keeping a rider on a bike while operating its brakes independently and steering it by hanging off the thing at angles that’d make Mick Doohan himself clutch his pearls, well that’s really something to experience.

The trouble for developer Milestone is that this has been true of their games for quite a few years now, and they keep making a new one that’s very similar and very slightly better than the last. If you play EA Sports FC, NBA 2K, EA F1 et al, you know the phenomenon: it’s simply that you get fatigued by buying your ticket for the same theme park ride, year after year.

There is new stuff, of course. Rider-based handling, which tweaks the physics and the feel of the controls. A revamped career mode, which lets you pick real riders from the MotoGP grid (but not Moto 2 or 3 – why?) as opposed to the usual custom rider and now features training events on production bikes, joining the other disciplines added last year.

Online servers are faster and more stable this year and benefit from cross-platform play, meaning there are usually a few more people in lobbies. There’s a collectible card system and a new rider number creator too, and if those are already the things that spring to mind when recalling the new content, you’ll take the point.

The real victims here are game critics. They say nurses have it tough, but have you ever really stopped and thought about how tricky it is to evaluate a series that’s fundamentally very enjoyable, but which changes only marginally each year and asks a full-price purchase?

What it boils down to is that if you care enough about MotoGP, the handling changes this year and the small career mode tweaks will be enough to sustain your interest for another go-around. The rider-based handling is a fine concept – you’re controlling the rider on the bike, not inputting on the bike controls directly – and while it does have a few gremlins when the new physics interacts with curbs or fast direction changes, broadly speaking it makes the riding deeply enjoyable, challenging enough to take real satisfaction from mastery, and a little bit more intuitive than it has been for the last three or four releases.

What does need to be patched quicker than Joan Mir’s leathers, though, is the wobble. When you upset the bike with a hasty throttle input or a harsh steering movement, too often you initiate a perpetual tank-slapper that can’t be rectified. You’ll see this happen maybe once a season in the real sport. In this game it’s once or twice a session – but maybe that’s just our riding.

Career mode does benefit this year from more interstitial scenes like press conferences and intra-team meetings. Your input is limited and there’s no voice acting to bring the cutscenes all the way to life, but they do deepen the fantasy of living the life more than the mode’s managed before.

How much mileage you get out of the training events between race weekends is slightly more questionable. It’s an act of generosity on developer Milestone’s part to include flat track, minibike, motard and production bike racing in addition to the complete 2026 MotoGP, Moto 2 and Moto 3 seasons, and these extra sessions are thoughtfully implemented as invites from the top riders, intended to capture the way real riders train together in different disciplines when they’re not at a race weekend.

The thing is, the MotoGP season is really long, and getting to grips with the prototypes themselves is hard enough. That means these perfectly good invites can often feel more like extra homework than an added treat.

Of all things, it’s the chance to take a current MotoGP rider and live their whole career all over again that’s the most exciting new addition. This doesn’t involve historical content, like the fantastical playable doc ‘Nine’ in MotoGP 22, so you can’t go back and ride Maverick Vinales’ Team Calvo KTM Moto 3 bike, but you can drop him on an Aspar or a Leopard bike and ride through his ascendancy up the categories.

Or you can let Pecco Bagnaia #gofree and start him off on this year’s Aprilia MotoGP bike to get an early glimpse of what 2027 might have in store when he makes that move for real.

But there are longstanding, small annoyances here that go unchecked each year. Kerbs behave in an unrealistically disruptive way when bikes of any category set foot on them, in a way that demonstrably doesn’t happen when you watch the lines the real riders take. You still have the same limited boots, glove and leather options and simple colour customisation without any deeper editing, which means your rider always looks simplistic next to the real guys.

And as fun as it may be to have a rider number editor which makes it quick and simple to design a convincing custom number design, the more complex version which power users created very impressive works on and then shared them to the community is… gone, now? Why?

So, then. If you love MotoGP, you’re already back into the cycle, and having a lot of fun with the new handling. But you’re still frustrated with the slow progress the series is making. And if you’re less into the sport and more about sampling racing games with a unique challenge, well you probably care less about the perfunctory options for customising your race boots, but you may be inclined to compare this game unfavourably to F1 25’s vast array of deep modes, or LMU’s online PvP.

As for us diehard, long-time fans, we always welcome a fresh excuse to get racing again, but we need something bold and genuinely new soon or we’re going to fade away like Pedro Acosta’s second-half race pace.