MotorStorm: Pacific Rift (PS3)

Spin your wheels again, but this time in a tropical paradise
10/30/2008 7:17 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

The heart of MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is this interplay among the different cars and the different routes through the different tracks. In this regard, there is no other racing game quite like MotorStorm. However, the actual gameplay has learned very little from other racing games. To achieve anything in a race, you have to finish in the top three places. If you don't, you get bupkis. Except for the first few races, it's not possible to win driving by the seat of your pants. You have to learn the track, and figure out the best route for a given vehicle. In fact, even more than driving, that's the main skill in MotorStorm: Pacific Rift: knowing the track. The courses are so cluttered with detail that it's hard to make out where you have to go as you're driving. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it's ultimately very gratifying to learn the geography well enough that you can tear though it and make meaningful choices as you drive. But even then, things will go wrong. The courses are littered with cheap "gotchas!," the artificial intelligence seems to rely overmuch on rubber-banding, and many of the vehicles have intentionally poor handling. You'll lose early and lose often. This is a game full of bupkis.

There is a new progression system in which you earn points to unlock new tracks, so this means Pacific Rift is much more generous about the number of different races you can fail at any given time. There are checkpoint races laid out along specific routes. There are also secondary goals for some races that unlock additional tracks -- for instance, win the race within a certain time limit, or without wrecking. Again, these are new ways to fail, which is the last thing MotorStorm needs.

Pimping your ride

The progression system also gives you new models and paint jobs for each of the kinds of vehicles. These look appropriately splashy, although they're yet another instance of MotorStorm missing the point. Games like Midnight Club, Forza and Saints Row 2 let you personally build, paint, and detail your vehicles. This creates a real sense of attachment. Loading some pre-set visual style is nice, but it's a distant second to being able to actually create that style. It's the difference between pimping your ride and getting your ride pimped by someone else.

The wrecks are spectacular, and there's no game that captures a messy traffic mash-up quite so well as MotorStorm: Pacific Rift. With 16 cars racing during a given race, there's sure to be a little friendly rubbing (there are even controls to lunge into an adjacent vehicle). When cars, trucks and motorcycles plow into each other, you'll see fenders, wheels, dirt and drivers go flying without so much as a hiccup in the frame rate. Even your own single-car wrecks are spectacular, with some fancy location-specific damage. Unfortunately, you're punished for watching your own wrecks, which defeats the purpose of all these lovely smash physics. Why can't Pacific Rift enforce a little downtime so I can admire the mayhem, instead of punishing me by letting the race run on until I press the button to exit the wreck? Although it could easily be, MotorStorm is no Burnout.