A revamped structure - still focused on a fictional festival of off-road racing - now breaks MotorStorm's linear progression into four, each thread focusing on one of the four themed zones of the Hawaiian setting: Fire (lava flows and volcanoes), Air (high altitude mountains), Earth (thick, muddy jungle) and Water (beaches and rivers). There's still some limiting of the vehicle classes you can use in each race as you unlock them, but it's generally less constrictive, and you can pick a favourite vehicle for each class in your garage to cut down on menu time.
When we visited, Evolution didn't have any Fire tracks available to play, but we had plenty of time with tracks from the other three zones. Kanaloa Bay (Earth) is a sprint across an open, lagoon-studded beach followed by an inland circuit of the kind of rocky, split-level terrain familiar from the first game's Monument Valley. In Cascade Falls (Water), vehicles push through a frenetic tangle of vegetation and plough through rivers and ponds before arriving at the money shot: a spectacular, sweeping banked turn under huge waterfalls.
We also try out two Air tracks. Rain God Spires takes place at an altitude of 8,000 feet, and features treacherously narrow runways over towering cliffs, and some stupendously over-the-top jumps. Meanwhile, Caldera Ridge - probably our favourite of the four - is an atmospheric pelt around the blackened summit of a volcano which threads through a ruined observatory before barrelling down a vast, wide-open slope. We also catch glimpses of Scorched - a Fire track on an active volcano, smothered in heat-haze - and Sugar Rush, a semi-indoor track weaving through a ruined sugar refinery, littered with hazards.
