Can someone send MotorStorm: Pacific Rift developer Evolution Studios the memo about games that don't move forward? The one that says you should always give the player some sort of reward, even (especially!) if he fails? The one that went to Codemasters when they made GRID, Rockstar when they made Midnight Club: Los Angeles, and Sony Liverpool when they made WipeOut HD? The one that explains the difference between challenge and frustration?

It's not that big a deal that Evolution missed the memo when they were making the first MotorStorm. It was probably a crazy time for them, what with making a launch game for the PlayStation 3 and all. I'm sure things were awfully hectic, so the memo got misplaced or thrown out. But it's been a year and a half, and the only reason I can imagine they made the same MotorStorm mistakes a second time is that they still haven't seen the memo.

Stuck in the (lovely) mud

I've been trying to get through a handful of races for a while now, and it seems entirely hit or miss whether I'm going to finish one, or whether I'll have simply wasted my four minutes for the umpteenth time. Does that make me a whiny baby? Maybe. But us whiny babies have plenty of other games to play besides MotorStorm: Pacific Rift.

To be fair, this isn't a bad racing game on most levels. It's got style in spades, sporting a combination of extreme racing and idyllic natural tracks, with a touch of "The Road Warrior." The new tracks look great and they manage to wring maximum variety from the tropical isle setting, with beaches, mountains, jungles and even that staple of videogaming, hot lava. While a lot of this is just eye candy, the game's boost mechanics play nicely with water and lava. Instead of grabbing power-ups for turbo-boosting, MotorStorm vehicles can boost freely -- but they build up heat when they boost. If they build up too much heat, they'll explode (unlike the real world, exploding is just a temporary setback). The twist is that water will cool down the turbo boost, and lava will heat it up faster. Some of the lava levels actually have periodic misters to put out lava fires. Cute. I've never been so happy for a mid-race car wash as when I'm on the rim of that volcano.

But the tropical setting is mostly an excuse for some really lush graphics. If there's a better looking racing game out there, particularly one so overgrown with nature, I haven't seen it. From the water effects to the volcano's steam, from the grand mountaintop vistas to the punishing close quarters of a run-down sugar plantation, from the rickety bridges to the dense fronds to the obligatory waterfalls, Pacific Rift is as visually inspired as the top-of-the-line shooters. The presentation is also excellent, with cool flyers and clever names for each track.

I'll get to Scotland before ye

There's a lot of great level design here, and not just visually. The tracks are wildly criss-crossing playgrounds of high roads, low roads, middle roads, shortcuts, ramps and tunnels. When you combine these with the types of vehicles, there's a nearly infinite combination of ways to drive (and mess up) each of the included 16 tracks. Each vehicle class has pros and cons when dealing with different routes. Motorcyles and ATVs, for instance, are ideal for ramps and narrow winding paths, whereas big rigs can plow through mud and water, and rally cars need long straightaways. The driving physics are top-notch. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift isn't afraid of traditionally frustrating mechanics like inertia and traction, and each vehicle type has a distinct feel. The new monster trucks are especially annoying in multiplayer, because they're big enough to run over small vehicles and fast enough to actually catch up with them.

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.

The multiplayer works well, with a convenient system for grouping and matchmaking based on rank. Evolution deserves credit for not neglecting split screen, either. This is one of the few recent high-profile racers that lets multiple people play each other in the same living room. Multiplayer races have an elimination mode that drops the last-place racer, which is a great way to do away with having to sit through multiple laps of a losing race.

But the biggest problem with MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is that racing games have come a long way in terms of being accessible and rewarding. For many players, building up a skill, whether it's mastering the handling of a particular car or learning the nuances of a particular track, is secondary to the thrill of driving fast and the gratification of getting newer and better stuff. Because Pacific Rift doesn't understand this, for all its fancy graphics, top-notch physics, and labyrinthine tracks, it still feels like MotorStorm: Take Two: We Didn't Get the Memo.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.