Don’t get us wrong, MotorStorm looks good enough, but it’s only during the big ‘wow’ moments that it really comes into its own.
But it’s the visuals that’ll make the loudest claims here: as we said above, the graphics are occasionally astounding, especially in terms of the destruction of the city, but they suffer from a slightly flat overall image (there’s little in the way of deep blacks and much of the game is rather muted) and some rough edges, but this makes way for a solid framerate with sixteen vehicles on screen, which is surely worth the compromise in fidelity. Likewise, the sound is equally brutal: distorted engines play against a booming drum and bass soundtrack from the likes of DJ Shadow and Noisia that screams out for surround sound or a decent pair of headphones. It’s not subtle, and purely simple arcade maths under the bonnet, but it’s well suited. A subtle switch to the cooling of the boosters (let go of both the accelerator and the turbo in the air) brings a minor element of tactics but for the most part it’s all out top-speed pedal to the metal racing, which a few corners designed for drifting thrown in. The controls fit perfectly too, the driving physics tuned to perfection, and save for a couple of oddities the game is designed to have the player at the very limits of each vehicle’s handling and grip from start to finish, all the while managing the turbo which, as we’ve seen before, is capable of turning your ride into a flaming wreck if pushed too hard.
The courses are also really well designed: they’re all varied enough to be distinct but consistent enough to be part of the same city, even when they’re flicking between dockland, parks and massive long bridges – they’re definitely better than anything we’ve seen from the series before and the balancing period the developers must have gone through has resulted in some truly memorable and utterly raceable courses. This works brilliantly – the tracks evolve gradually over the storyline, new routes appear (and old ones become obstructed) and a few, like the Boardwalk track, show just what Evolution are capable of in terms of – literally – breathtaking visuals as the second and third iterations appear.
What this means is that although you’ll race on the same courses more than once, because they’ll appear at different times in each thread they’ll be, for example, at night rather than during the day, or suffering under different levels of the ‘quake. The game is split into around forty races in single player mode, divided up into three stories that act as difficulty levels, telling the same two-day tale from alternative viewpoints as they go along. Sure, the first couple of races serve up little excitement (they’re more of a gentle introduction to the controls) but once you’re about four or five tracks in the action kicks up a few gears, the courses start to flex their muscles and, hugely impressively, the city starts to fall apart. Thankfully, and much more importantly, once you’re onto the track MotorStorm Apocalypse is an absolute blast. Not that this is a negative, once you’re through the game once it’ll almost certainly be the choice of most for repeated play-throughs, but MotorStorm has survived just fine without this new element, and whilst it tries its best it just doesn’t slot into the game as neatly as we’d have hoped. These guys need somewhere to race, why shouldn’t it be in an ever changing, considerably more lethal locale than they’ve had before? Sorting out the men from the boys is the basic, cliched mechanic here, told through clunky animated comic-book cutscenes that never seem to find their feet and remain eminently skippable even if doing so will render the single player story mode little more than a series of races. The plot – such as it is – is as implausible as it is irritating, even if the central device, the reason d’etre, is sound enough.
Apocalypse, as you’ve no doubt already gathered from the oodles of hands-on impressions we’ve been running over the last year or so, is based on the west coast of the US, in a city not dissimilar to a potent blend of San Francisco and Los Angeles the twist? It’s in the middle of a huge earthquake: reason enough, it seems, for Big Dog and his merry band of hardcore racers to base their next festival right in the middle of all the destruction.
Those MotorStormers certainly get around the planet, each excursion more dangerous and extreme than the last – and whilst this fourth title in the series returns to America, it’s in an entirely different setting than Monument Valley.