Take the mayhem of Daytona's oval circuit pile-up carnage, the addictive off-road gameplay of a Rallisport and the brilliance of Burnout's speed and crashes, then multiply it all loads and you have merely the foundation of what MotorStorm is.
It's an off-road racer with a choice of seven vehicle types going up against each other, with between eight and fifteen vehicles in any one race. The variety in vehicles on offer, and the dynamic play created by having them all fight for the win together, is a big part of the fun in MotorStorm; get on a bike for a light, speedy but demanding ride, crush everything and everyone in sight inside a big rig or a racing truck, or really get into the spirit of things in a buggy or a rally car.
It's instantly enjoyable, highly addictive and wonderfully unpretentious throughout. And most importantly, it feels like a proper next-gen gaming experience.
But the killer ingredient is the physics engine. Not in a stuffy, simulator way where you have to worry about what your tyres are made out of or what petrol you're using. But full-on environment, vehicle, driver and crash physics that add an unprecedented feeling of depth to the gameplay. As you bounce around the wildly undulating terrain in a buggy, go flying off your bike into a rocky wall, or smash through anything in your way in a truck, this is pure fun as you fight to keep control of the race and master a track.
The physics are everywhere. If you're hurtling along and just clip a small bit of tyre on the edge of an unfortunately positioned rock, get ready for a rough landing after a brilliant crash; you'll never just bump off a wall and carry on. Hit some barrels or a spare heavyweight tyre left laying around in the vast, object-rich environments, and they'll keep tear down the track for a hundred metres, believably and intimately bouncing on every part of rocky wall and uneven track, while the rag doll driver animation is the real deal here - watching in slow motion as a driver is thrown into a cliff before his own bike lands and crushes back onto his body, or as hundreds of vehicle parts explode into different directions, is spellbinding stuff.
Crashes are as diverse as the tiniest differences in their causes; they're not pre-animated but properly calculated based on the weight, momentum, density and strength of everything involved. Every crash is as enthralling as it is punishing, whether it's a rear-wheel skid out of control, a stomach-wrenching hurtling down several storeys' worth of rocky terrain, or just full head-on explosions of incompetence that are too spectacular to describe, the crashes are just plain awesome but they lead to time penalty before you respawn onto the track. The fact that all major crashes trigger slow-motion close-up action means you can really appreciate the effect of the crash, and even if you just lost pole position you can't help but smile. Although the respawn time delay is relatively lenient, you'll usually lose a few places in the race, and you can always skip past the crash proceedings if you prefer.
But for all this tangible feeling to things, it's ultimately an arcade-like experience; it makes driving fun for the sake of driving, and it was a good few races before we started putting actual effort into winning races and progressing through the game's 'ticket'-based system.
There are 21 tickets in total, each with a name that hints at what you're up against: Festival, Plain Dirty, Speed Kills, and In at the Deep End - the only four accessible at first - and there's plenty to be getting on with. As you accumulate points and gold medals, you unlock more tickets and vehicles.
Tickets get progressively more challenging, with 'Level 4' challenges feeling virtually impossible but the earlier Level 1 challenges relatively straightforward after some perseverance. There's an all-bike event called 'The Chase' which is an unpredictable, manic battle with aggressive bike opponents, while other locked tracks like Colossus, Rushin' Roulette, Deep in the Hole and Breakback Mountain, are as eyebrow-raising as they sound.
Level 4 difficulty is thanks not just to track design, but largely enemy AI; in tough challenges you'll even find yourself being tag-teamed and steamrollered into the dirt. Often, if you don't get a quick, aggressive lead early on you can forget about getting a leading finish position unless you really know the track; even if you hold it tight for a while it won't be long until a truck is up your ass, then the quads and bikers follow like rats and everyone messes up your plan to win, but it's amazingly well balanced and fun-spirited, despite the aggressive overtones.
In fact, AI is an area that's really taken to genuine new heights for a racing title. The hundreds of 'events' that occur during a race are called Gags, with a fairly complex AI system of context and chance determining how vehicles interact - whether it's a biker looking back at you and offering an offensive hand gesture, or taunting other drivers to make them mad and begin a determined attempt to ram you off the track. Bikers and quad-bikers can also punch each other, Road Rash style, which is only fair since the bigger cars can all fight dirty by ramming you. It's pure entertainment value and the kind of beyond-duty developer attention to detail that this generation should rightfully be about.
Each ticket is made up of between one and four tracks, such as Rain God Mesa, The Grizzly, and The Tenderizer. The track variety on offer is nice, with plenty of open space offering a better sense of speed in some, and a more pressing, claustrophobic feel to others.
The wildly entertaining, non-linear tracks are pretty much the stars of the show. There are often several heights of track along same part of course: sun-baked high ground is usually a lot dryer than the muddy low terrain, which is sometimes just a half-pipe of sludge, but it's trickier to stay up on high track without plummeting back down at some point. While the highroad doesn't always offer the best racing line, being more solid ground it's the preferred terrain for smaller vehicles, unlike the mud pluggers and big rigs which power through the sludgy low terrain with relative ease.
The different terrain heights do not always hug around each other either, but sometimes meander around cliff edge completely independent of other levels - you'll see passing competitors above overhead, crossing sideways over a bridge and jumping through the air at a distant point of the track, even though you may realistically meet them at the joining part of the track a few moments afterwards. And the undulation entry and exit points are clearly marked, but not always easy to catch in time, often requiring good timing to reach. This superb track design makes for comfortably strategic and dynamic race experience, and there are no invisible walls or cheap track elements; say there's some wooden structure, if there's enough space to drive underneath it you can, although you can smash through it in a truck if you prefer
But track isn't the only thing to pay attention to. The other dynamic is the boost feature, common in many racing games and an invaluable tool in MotorStorm. After ten seconds at the start of the race, your boost is ready for use. It fills up automatically, at about half the rate it depletes during use. If you use the boost for too long in once go, your engine overheats, an alarm beeps and your vehicle BLOWS UP - you die, and respawn in the same way you do after a crash.
At first it might seem the boost is overgenerous, in that you don't need to 'earn' it with powerslides as you do in Ridge Racer. But in the tough levels, it must be used wisely; correct execution at the right parts of the track will mean you have a chance of winning, but the AI opposition also gets very proficient at using its boost as well, so there are no guarantees of success. The boost component adds yet more depth to the experience.
While races are often incredibly tough to win, practice makes perfect. Using the right paths and driving lines to catch up and overtake is a matter of skill and discipline, and your positioning is based on your driver, not the car, so you can blow up and explode over the finish line, hoping that the explosion throws your driver over the other cars and steals you the win at the last possible second. Clearly, this is the most awesome thing ever.
So the game plays like a dream, to be quite honest. But another big part of the enjoyment is the immersive, tangible world you race in, and that's thanks not just to the physical laws of the track, but the outstanding visual quality too.
The art style is also vibrant, with everything from original vehicles to menu screens and logos presented beautifully. Meanwhile, licensed background music, including the likes of Nirvana, has an open-air concert feel to it, so it feels like you're in the great outdoors, not sat at home on your PS3
We've not talked about the optional motion sensing control yet. It's not an integral part of the experience and it feels like it's only in as an afterthought. But it's not as bad as in some other games. If you hold the controller like a wheel (brainwave - perhaps this was the real idea behind the wheel-shaped prototype controller from E3 05, and therefore motion was planned all that time ago before Wii's controller was unveiled the following TGS), tilted up at a 45 degree angle, the motion control does feel like it works rather naturally.
You can accurately control the wheel as you would in an arcade cabinet (or, erm, a real car maybe, but that would involve putting clothes on and going outside), and overall it almost works. But in tight situations or during acceleration to get back into the race after veering off, it's way too sensitive and there is no intelligent interpretation that helps you with what it thinks you might have been (read: were obviously) trying to do. Until you get the hang of things, just driving straight can be a challenge. It is better from the outside view rather than the in-car/bonnet view.
While motion control in MotorStorm does feel effective and all next-gen-like at times, it's obviously a hasty addition, but decent effort has been put into making it work. It's a relief to go back to analogue control though. And we know what we'd rather have had in MotorStorm between motion and rumble. Bring on thirdparty controllers that have both, while Sony does PS3 owners a disservice by NOT quitting the nonsense and settling a certain lawsuit.
In conclusion, to be quite honest we're in love with MotorStorm. When you look at this code with a forward-looking perspective, if there's one game that really shows off the POTENTIAL of the PS3 beyond Xbox 360 right now, absolutely it's MotorStorm, and Evolution is to be saluted for putting together such an awesome package.
Forget MGS or Final Fantasy. MotorStorm is the PS3's first killer app.
