GAME CLEAR No. 286 -- Jet Moto

Jet Moto (1996, PlayStation/PC)

Developer: Sony Interactive Studios America, SingleTrac
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Clear Version: PS1
Clear Platform: PS5
Clear Date: 3/27/26

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Why should I care?
Putting a grappling hook in a racing game is a great idea.

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Wild ride

Jet Moto is a game that should’ve been awesome. It’s got all-terrain, high-speed hoverbikes, surf rock, and a cool comic book aesthetic (that even predates the same look found in my beloved F-Zero X). Racers also have grappling hooks they can use to whip around sharp turns. Great. Unfortunately, the execution just isn’t quite there. Jet Moto doesn’t totally fail to realize its ambitious ideas, but it’s rough enough to be difficult to recommend without a lot of caveats.

The basics are there. Jet Moto features a motley cast of characters each racing for one of the game’s four teams (two of which are named after real-life sponsors Butterfinger and Mountain Dew). The tracks are nicely varied and span biomes from aquatic to mountainous. The soundtrack is genuinely great and suits its high-speed setting.

The most fundamental failing of this game is that a feeling of genuine control is nearly impossible to come by. It’s not uncommon for more challenging racing games to have a learning curve with respect to basic control. F-Zero GX is notoriously difficult, but that’s because it demands excellence in its extremely well-tuned controls. Mastery is both very possible and very rewarding. Mastery in Jet Moto seems completely unattainable.

Part of this feeling may be a somewhat illusory result of unfair AI tuning. If I were just trying to become a time trial god, maybe this game would be pretty deep and fun. However, inasmuch as the ostensibly primary objective is to win the Full Season mode on Professional difficulty to unlock the ending, I was quite put off by the opponents I had to contend with.

Again, though, the opponents on the higher difficulties of my beloved F-Zero require extremely competent play to beat. The difference, again, is that mistakes in those games always feel like the fair result of player error. In Jet Moto, they tend to feel more like the result of geometry jank, pop-in, and/or brutally unwieldy control. I often felt that my approach to any given turn never resulted in the same outcome twice.

A bit of mercy the game shows is that you can save between every race of a season. This means that with enough patience, you can place high enough in enough races to win the season if you try and try again. As is common in multi-race formats, you earn points for your placement in each race. The goal is to have the most at the end of the season. You could theoretically win a season without ever winning any individual race.

The way this game interacts with that fact is actually more interesting than many of its peers. Each racer has his or her own custom bike, and those bikes have their own strengths and weaknesses. The way those interact with each course vary pretty significantly. The character I won with, for example, is very fast on the straights and extremely sturdy (meaning contact with opponents will seldom result in him falling off his bike). His turning is DOGSHIT, though. These combined mean that more winding tracks are a real problem for him, but more open tracks or busier (and more collision-prone) tracks are much easier. There were a couple courses I simply could not imagine a way to finish first in, but others I managed in just a try or two.

This is just a totally different approach from nearly every other racing game I’ve played, in which a full season or grand prix sweep is at worst feasible or at best expected. It forces you to know your machine’s limits and plan your path to victory accordingly. I kind of respect it! Still, there’s also something pretty demoralizing about being straight up incapable of winning certain races when coming from that other, more common world I described.

It’s a shame. Jet Moto looked and sounded like something I’d love right up until I got my hands on it. It just didn’t quite come together.