MotorStorm review (PlayStation 3)

425. That number has been banded around every last bit of press, news, review and feature on the Playstation in the UK and struck me as an annoyance rather than a worry. I knew I was going to buy myself a PS3 years ago when it was first announced (along with that wonderful next-gen duck bathtub demonstration; actually it was the eye toy cup real time water section that got me), and from delay to delay I lost the total fanboyesque enthusiasm that gripped the world until I was pleasantly surprised to find the release was suddenly happening soon.

My Hi-Def Next-Gen fix had been satiated pretty well by the Xbox 360, and it was more of a duty to purchase the PS3 for the notable exclusives such as the next Metal Gear and Final Fantasy incarnations. March 23rd rolled in, and my PS3 arrived along with a few of the launch games to pass a bit of time before the real releases came out further on in the PS3’s life. As it happens, I’ve been rather impressed with the exclusives that I’ve played, not least starting with Motorstorm. Rather than the normal leeway you give a system’s first few games, I’m sure I’ll be playing Motorstorm for quite some time in the future, and over the course of the next few paragraphs, you’ll find out why.

The design principle

Motorstorm seems to take a lot of great ideas, throw them together and fashions a game out of them. Quite simply, it is a racing game set in a series of well designed grand canyon style environments. You can choose from a large selection of vehicles from motorbikes to big rig trucks and pretty much any of the separate classes you can imagine inbetween. (My favourite is the green bike with a rather shapely female driving it… for no reason.) Races can involve the same classes or mixtures of them creating a ridiculously varied racing style depending on who else is on the track. Bikes and ATVs can punch each other off, whereas a ‘Big Rig’ can get away with a swift ram to dislodge opponents, and any of them can, with some clever driving, force any other to either career off a cliff or explode into pieces on a protruding rockface.

The races take place in some of the most exciting environments I have seen in a racing game, and while there are only eight to choose from, and they are all generally Grand Canyonesque, some of them focus on tight canyons, others on wide open dusty planes and even more on huge jump filled rock formations. Each map is split into a selection of routes for the vehicles to take, and the surface of each route will help/hinder each vehicle class in different ways, giving different advantages for each one. The scale of these areas and the detail present is staggering with destructable environments present in more ways than one. While you can smash through signs, blockades and almost anything that doesn’t look like a big rock, as you race around, you will leave tracks and indentations within the mud and dirt that physically alter your race in the following laps.

Wow, the PS3 is so shiny

It’s almost a cliché, but while technically the same generation as the 360, we were all expecting something extra special with the PS3 (possibly because of the Killzone 2 deception, though mainly for the pricetag), and Motorstorm delivers graphically. 15 person races with widely different vehicles around some ridiculously beautiful (and gradually more disgusting) terrain that uniquely can be called both smooth and shaky. Smooth for the consistently brilliant framerate yet shaky because of the variety of the terrain, allowing your vehicles to feel every last bump on the track.

The bumps and jolts become a very important part of the race as you are fighting for pole position, and the addition of a turbo boost, activated by holding the X button adds another tactical aspect to the game. Your boost meter gradually fills up as you use it, as the heat is generated. It gradually depletes as you race, and during massive jumps through the air (of which there are plenty,) it will cool faster, which is a useful factor when overheating will cause you to explode in a shower of parts, smoke and undoubtedly a satisfying explosion.

Raced in Motorstorm, bought the T-Shirt, and the CD?

As you would expect, the sound quality is top notch with screeching engine sounds speeding past you as you hear the car to your right smash into a rockface at breakneck speed, all enhanced by a loud and intense soundtrack. With 21 music tracks, there will definitely be a song or two that really gets you going into the race, and a few that you’ll be wishing you had the CD for. Unfortunately, because of the long lengths of the race, you’ll hear a couple of songs per time, and repeats come around quickly. Don’t get me wrong, the soundtrack is great, but too small for the sheer amount of racing that I want to do!

The game is unfortunately just split into two choices, online and offline. The offline game takes the form of a selection of tickets that you must earn, to be allowed to race in each event. 21 tickets are available in total, with up to four races per ticket depending on the difficulty and ticket itself. This seems like plenty of races for the single player ‘campaign’, especially since the difficulty of gaining first place will take quite some time to master. Five levels of difficulty progress through the tickets, and each race completed will earn points to unlock more tickets and more vehicles to choose from, but unfortunately, that’s it for the single player. To make up for it, the AI is as spectacular as expected, with your competitors using every route to their advantage (or not), ramming other vehicles off the track in front of you, and generally giving a feeling that your opponents are alive, and reacting to everything around them, rather than just hunting you down and ignoring everyone else (at least at the start of the game).

The online mode is excellent fun though too, especially since there is no further payment required. Getting into a game was simple and it picked up on my friends list, even if I was never online at the same time to play with them. While the game can sometimes be punishing, having a load of humans to compete against makes it ever more satisfying when you punch someone off their ATV, quickly shooting into a boost before a jump as your closest foe just misses ramming you and flies inevitably into a wall, smashing to pieces. Good times.

Wanting more is both a good and bad thing

Unfortunately, the lack of racing options isn’t the only aspect of the game that seems like it is missing. A few more tracks would have been nice, but the ones present are so good that I never felt like I’d been sold short. A split screen offline racing mode would have been nice for when you want to show off not only your brand new PS3 to your friends, but also your racing skills, but the biggest missing feature I would have thought would be the easiest.

Why are there no instant replays? Part of the selling point of the game is how damn good it looks, and the dramatic crashing and dynamic physics would have made me more than happy to sit through an instant replay with flashy camera angles. Hell, even an option for a 10 second replay would have been well received, after a dramatic crash or an amazing bit of driving, as each race still manages to excite me throughout, especially when I have taken the last corner too fast in second place, smashing sideways into the leader, tipping him over and claiming victory for myself.

The game costs a lot… if you’re buying a PS3.

There is an attempt to put in a Sixaxis tilting control system, so you hold your controller as you would a steering wheel and turn it, but I never felt particularly comfortable with it, especially since you still need to hold down the accelerate button constantly to go anywhere. Perhaps the mere fact that it is set to be off by default says it all.

While the loading times are a little lengthy, especially when choosing which vehicle to use, scrolling through them is a chore that I could have done without, but aside from that, there seems nothing wrong with Motorstorm at all. It even feels like the races are fair and that your opponents don’t cheat. The truth of the matter is that it will sell very well despite any reviews, because of the limited choices of a newly released console, but in this case it certainly deserves to, being a ridiculous amount of fun to play and watch. (I’ve had friends over just to play alternate races offline, and lapped (pun not intended) it all up).

Motorstorm is a great game, especially as a launch game to show off the system’s capabilities, and with the promise of new modes (and a new track) being released soon as downloadable content, it seems hard not to recommend Motorstorm to anyone who has a PS3. If it and Resistance: Fall of Man have been enough to convince the three of my friends I have let play it to shell out £425 for the console alone, it has got to be doing something right.