GameSpy Review of MotorStorm: Pacific Rift

The original MotorStorm featured fast and furious off-road racing, a vertigo-inducing sense of velocity, and completely over-the-top Burnout-style crashes. It also suffered from a dearth of vehicles and courses and deathly long load times. None of these flaws were evidence of a lack of imagination or technical skill on developer Evolution's part; they were just unfortunate side effects of trying to push the game out as a PS3 launch title. But now that Evolution's had some time to put the bun back in the oven, the finished product delivers on the original's promise. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is the racer we hoped to get 18 months ago, and it was well worth the wait.





Pacific Rift's main event is Festival Mode, in which you race through courses divided into the four different "zones" of earth, fire, air, and water. Initially, only a couple of courses are unlocked in each. Placing in a race's top three spots earns you points, which unlock additional courses and events. There are 12 drivers in each race, and each race is limited to certain vehicle types.





Most races are the usual first-to-the-finish affairs, but there are also Speed challenges where you race through waypoints and Eliminator races, where last-place racers explode when the timer runs out. But since these were all present in the original, a few new race varieties would have been welcome.










Get On Your Bikes and Ride





Like the early days of the UFC, when judo black-belts would face off against sumos, MotorStorm: Pacific Rim is a monstrous mash of a variety of vehicle types, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. MotorStorm's seven original vehicle classes return and are joined by the new super-badass Monster Truck class, which doesn't have to slow down for any terrain (or other drivers), but does need to take it easy around corners.





Generally speaking, smaller, lighter vehicles are faster, more maneuverable, and able to jump further. Larger, heavier vehicles can plow through mud, water, and dense foliage without suffering momentum loss, and they can run down any smaller vehicles whose drivers lack the sense to get the hell out of the way.





Mastering the boost system is the key to success in Pacific Rift. You can ride the boost until its heat meter maxes out, at which point you're in danger of blowing up if you don't let up. That's unchanged from the original game, but new environmental features affect how long you can push it in Pacific Rift. Driving through water cools it down and lets you boost longer, but it also slows you down. Lava heats you up and limits your boosting potential, but sometimes cutting a corner dangerously close to a lava flow is worth it, especially if there's an oasis ahead to douse your flames.

















Crash Courses





The spectacularly detailed crashes are the true money shots of the game, each one a slow-motion disintegration of your ride that shows off MotorStorm's near-perfect physics engine. And if you can't bear to watch your ride wrecked in gory detail, they're easily skippable with a press of a button.





When you're getting the feel for a course for the first time or re-racing an old course with a new vehicle, it's like a highlight reel from the Discovery Channel's "Destroyed In Seconds." And that's one of Pacific Rift's's more frustrating elements. As cool as the crashes are (to your friends, anyway), the game seems to think that they're even cooler and triggers them at every opportunity.





Complaining that the crash physics are too tetchy is just going to get you singled out as a noob by true MotorStorm fans, and rightly so. Investing time into mastering each course results in a much smoother race. And after the initial learning curve, the difficulty doesn't really ramp up until you're nearly halfway through Festival Mode. But for a boost-happy arcade racer like Pacific Rift, the unforgiving crash mechanics seem contradictory and unnecessarily frustrating, especially when you're in the process of learning each course.





And with 16 courses in the core game, you've got a fair number to get to know. Not only are there are twice as many as in the original MotorStorm, most are also longer and more complex. Each course is designed to be raced in a different way depending on your vehicle: ATVs should choose routes full of jumps and tight turns, while Big Rigs need to find the straightest route possible and can plow through obstacles that other drivers would have to avoid.










The courses deform as racers tear them up. Smashing into a large sign might drop it and turn it into a new ramp, while skidding into a stack of tires scatters them and presents a new obstacle to avoid during your next lap. And when larger vehicles shred through dense foliage, they clear a path for smaller vehicles that couldn't have otherwise gone that way.





Dividing up the courses into four zones quadruples the visual variety of the courses, which display an eye-popping level of realism but suffer from a slightly muted color palette. Many courses seem to have a very few rough bits that skimp on the texture detail, but only two types of gamers will consistently notice them: incredibly nit-picky game reviewers and the amateur racers who crash near them. But these are very minor quibbles for an otherwise stunning game. Make no mistake: Pacific Rift is one of the most visually impressive racers ever seen, and one of the only games that can hold a candle to it is its own predecessor.





World in Motion





For the first time in the MotorStorm franchise, split-screen multiplayer is available for up to four players. The texture detail takes a forgivable hit, but the framerate doesn't. If you really want to race against your fellow MotorStorm enthusiasts, though, jump into an online race against up to 11 other players. Racing against human opponents feels different from competing against the AI, since AI can't match the irrational aggression of a gamer afflicted with little man syndrome who just wants to mow down Bikes in his Mudplugger.





But the attitude of your opponents is really the only difference between playing online or off. Standard and Eliminator races are the only modes available, with the usual ranked and unranked race options and leaderboards for the world's elite to make their mark. As with the single-player experience, it would be nice to see additional race types. Crashes are such a big part of the game that it's hard to believe there isn't a deathmatch-style mode that features them. And some of the courses are so huge and open that they'd lend themselves to a variety of non-traditional race types.





Evolution has promised loads of downloadable content for Pacific Rift, so let's hope that new ways to play are on the horizon. But even if they're not, MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is a very worthy sequel. It doesn't change any of the fundamental aspects of the original's gameplay; it just builds on them and gives you a helluva lot more bang for your buck. And considering that those who saw the original's unrealized potential forgave its imperfections, that's exactly what it had to do.

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