Motorstorm: Pacific Rift

Recent press reports about how annoyed Evolution were about those first Motorstorm target renders aside, Sony would do well to ensure that they keep the studio happy, as they’re capable of pushing the PS3 to its limits.

In truth, Motorstorm was the game that made me front up the ridiculous amount of cash for an early PS3 and though brilliant quality releases have been sparse, it’s starting to come into its own.

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift might well have been released in a packed schedule, but for fans of the original it should definitely not be overlooked. So what’s new? And what have Evolution Studios done to live up to their name, in other words how has Motorstorm evolved?

First up – completely trash your opinions of the game based on the demo as that was an incredibly early build and the whole game has been given a serious visual overhaul. The vast selection of vehicles has been polished up and there’s pretty much something for everyone in there ranging from nippy little dirtbikes that can corner like they’re on rails, to hulking great big ungainly monster trucks that don’t need to corner – they just plough through everything on the track.

Frame rates are silky smooth for the most part, though when things get busy and you’re the meat in a monster-truck sandwich, surrounded on all sides by nefarious AI drivers who want to pound you into the ground like a tent-peg, the game can drop a few frames here and there but nothing deal-breaking. There’s very little screen-tear in evidence either which definitely improves over the original.

Vehicles aside, the track designs are utterly stunning. You might have thought that Disney’s recent offroader Pure had all the looks and brilliant tracks, but Motorstorm: Pacific Rift knocks it into a cocked hat and you don’t have to faff around trying to perform trick combos to get ahead either, so it’s a more pure offroad racing experience (if you’ll pardon the pun).

The game is set on a series of tropical islands and there are vastly different vistas on offer, everything from a ruined hilltop observatory through lush tropical rainforests to a steaming choking ash-covered volcanic magma spew.

Track areas are split up into categories covering Earth, Air, Fire and Water with track designs and layouts matching these elemental guidelines. In earth you’ll find yourself wallowing in the mud so you might want something with plenty of grip that can cut through sludge. Air tracks feature massive jumps and plenty of death-defying drops over sheer cliffs. Fire covers the aforementioned volcanic lava-strewn tracks and Water, well it’s all about the wet stuff so pack your waders.

Rather neatly this time round, your environment can affect your boost gauge. Remember this from the first game? Your boost gauge slowly fills up and gets hotter. Keep your finger on the button for too long and your vehicle will explode, taking you with it, so you have to finely balance how much you use it, saving it up till you really need a good solid lead.

On certain tracks, driving through water will “freeze” your boost gauge allowing you to boost for longer. In hot dusty enviroments, particularly the lava-strewn ones, your boost gauge will fill up faster meaning that using it becomes riskier. It’s a great little piece of extra design that makes the game all the more challenging.

Unlike the first game you won’t have to wait around to leap into a game either. Select a driver, select a vehicle and you’re into a race before you’ve even had a chance to check whether your Sixaxis is charged. The front end and menus are a lot slicker and even though you can leap into the garage to tweak and look at different vehicles, this is purely optional.

As you race and place in the top three positions, you can begin to earn trophies and unlock different race challenges, new suits for your racer or rider, and a whole plethora of new vehicles. Rather than making you wait around until you’ve completed a particular race, you can shuffle between all the available unlocked races at will, which is a nice touch considering how brutally hard the game can be and how unforgiving the AI drivers are.

Handling isn’t too bad, but if there’s one thing that Evolution studios need to work on, it’s the “grip” stuff but to be fair to them, most offroad racers get it wrong. At times there’s no sense that the vehicle you’ve chosen is actually digging into the surface of a track at all, so you’ve got a straight choice – go for something lightweight and manoeuvrable like a bike, but risk being smashed to bits by other racers – or go for something big and lumpy that chronically oversteers, meaning you’ll spend most of your time watching the rather fantastic (and thankfully skippable) smash-up animations of your vehicle and driver / rider.

Online, Motorstorm: Pacific Rift takes on a whole new persona. Now races feature up to 16 players, and even though the matchmaking side of things can seemingly take ages, once you’re into an online game you’ll find that plenty of practice in single-player against brutal AI pays dividends, allowing you to face off against the best of the best world Motorstorm PR players.

It’s neat that you can also race in split screen local multiplayer modes for a bit of post-pub action. Not nearly enough racers allow this nowadays with the emphasis on network play but it’s far more rewarding when you can elbow the person sitting next to you on the sofa and watch them go careering over a cliff to their doom.

So what’s the downside of Motorstorm: Pacific Rift? Other than the fact that it’s not reinventing the wheel and owes a lot to its predecessor, there’s still a gaping wide open gap in the market for a proper Rally game (remember Evolution Studios’ WRC series on last-gen consoles and how utterly fantastic they were? Why on earth haven’t we seen anything like that in this generation of uber-fast graphically superior machines?)

At times, Motorstorm: Pacific Rift wears its arcade-racer heart firmly on its sleeve and you’ll really wish that all the fantastic little effects and easily missed graphical nuances had been traded up for a really good driving model and some serious attention to real-world physics.

But these shouldn’t put you off buying the game. With some seriously gorgeous visuals, plenty of challenges in single and multiplayer modes and more than enough trophies to earn, fans of the original should be beating a path to their local games retailer to pick this up (or more sensibly biding their time until the flood of new releases has steadied to a trickle, and picking it up on the cheap in the January sales).

Either way, Motorstorm: Pacific Rift certainly shouldn’t be shunted onto a siding and is definitely worth buying.

Our rating

8/10