MotorStorm: Pacific Rift Review

The original MotorStorm hit the PlayStation 3 with no holds barred. The game was an off-road racer at its core, but its heart was filled with chaos, destruction and more chaos. Oh, and also lots of destruction. While the game was great fun, it did have its share of problems, mostly with regards to plenty of waiting for content to load as well as only having a handful of tracks to race.

Evolution Studios has now returned to the dirt and mud with MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, but this time the studio also brings fire, water and foliage in tow. The game improves on most all of the major issues that I had with the first title, and proves that the MotorStorm franchise is no one trick pony.

The first game relied heavily on its dirt and mud deformation technology. As vehicles cut through the mud, it would leave tracks in the soil that other competitors would have to deal with, and this hook worked pretty well. Whereas the first title was situated out in the desert, Pacific Rift takes place on an island, and focuses on other elements rather than just the dirty stuff.

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Firstly, there's plenty of water present this time around, which has two effects. Driving through it will slow you down a great deal, which is obviously a bad thing, but it will also quickly cool down your engine. If you lay off the boost button while in the water, your engine can entirely cool off in a couple seconds. Alternatively, you can lay on the boost and essentially apply the nitrous for "free" and power through the water.

Obviously the bigger vehicles have a much easier time here, and in some cases the water is deep enough that only the biggest rides can even go through it safely. This is one part of the great mix of vehicle abilities, which I'll come back to in a bit.

The next of the major elements is fire, which is usually in the form of lava. This is nothing but bad for your lap times as touching it equals melted metal (read: death), even getting near it overheats your engine, and using boost will max out your meter very quickly.

What's cool here is that a lot of the fire-based levels also feature bits of water, allowing you to cool off your engine and gain an advantage over the competition, should you take a certain route. Some of these routes come with a tradeoff -- you'll be taking the longer path, but you'll be able to boost for longer. In this case, the vehicles that benefit more from boost are better served going this route, while rides that don't may want to stick to the faster path and take it easy on the boost button.

Lastly, foliage also plays a big part in some of the races. You'll see bits of vegetation all over the game, especially in a course based around a farming outpost. Bikes will get destroyed by the stalks, racing trucks can get by, but slowly, while the biggest rides will plow right over it. When the bigger vehicles run through the stuff, it'll stay smashed and the smaller rides will now be able to use the same path. It almost makes for a dynamic course layout, where the bigger vehicles can actually help out the smaller ones by paving a new, shorter path.

For the most part, the track design is excellent. There's at least double the number of courses this time around than we saw in the first title, which is great news for those of us who grew tired of playing the same courses over and over again. While those courses were good, these are great. They feature alternate routes are aplenty, with tons of criss-crossing ledges and cliff-sides that interweave over and under each other. Some are more straightforward but filled with mud or water, while the higher stuff requires more driving precision that only the smaller vehicles really offer.