MotorStorm (PS3)

The MotorStorm Festival. A fictitious event taking place in Monument Valley, this absolutely massive celebration in the desert features intense activities like men driving bikes off of a cliff only to leap off and open their parachutes. It has cars driving tight figure eights where the fans are standing so close they’d get clipped if the drivers stray even a slight bit from their perfect course. An absurd amount of people have gathered for this celebration, but despite there being cutscenes celebrating the raucous daredevil attitude of the drivers, the player will only be participating in the races, and while these don’t feature the kind of death-defying tricks that will get your blood pumping, they still have plenty of danger and excitement to give.

 

MotorStorm is a racing game with a heavy focus on off-roading through the mud and the dust of the desert. The MotorStorm festival has constructed eight courses by placing all sorts of ramps, bridges, and obstacles around the natural buttes and mesas of the American Southwest, making every course a mix of the curated areas meant to encourage high speed racing and the unexpected obstacles the real world brings in with its uncaring layouts. The eight venues encourage choosing your own path forward, many stretches of the track wide enough that you can choose which obstacles to tackle or how daring you wish to be during turns. Other areas may feature plenty of splitting paths where a wrong move might throw you down onto the lower and longer road, and sometimes hitting the ramps right is required keep your advantage even though the course isn’t going to make that easy.

While eight venues is definitely a small amount and you will certainly begin to feel the repetition set in as you replay them, they do all feel distinct from each other even though they aren’t going for any off the wall gimmicks. One will have you flirting with the constant threat of spilling over the side to a long fall, and while you will be set back on track any time your vehicle gets wrecked beyond repair, the time lost can give your rival racers more than enough time to catch up in these often tight competitions. Another course litters its paths with rocks that are easy to smash into if you’re going too fast to effectively maneuver around them, while another has a heavy focus on jumps and turns that requires you to have a good handle on your machine to avoid going off course. One common feature across every course though is the way mud impacts the races. Mud will naturally slow down any vehicle that has to go through it, but on each lap you’ll find the deformation the mud has gone through can change how it influences your play. You may slip into a pit made by a large vehicle’s wake or you can try to safely travel in a tire trench to avoid the sliding about, and while it can often be best to just avoid mud entirely, especially since it splatters your screen a bit and makes it a bit harder to see the action, courses like Mudpool really do their best to force you to deal with it as often as they can.

 

The eight tracks do sound like hardly anything to work with, but the single player has an interesting way of contextualizing them that ends up helping with the game’s longevity. MotorStorm has a wide variety of vehicle types available for the races and will mix up not only what you’re racing against, but often requires you to use one specific type of vehicle yourself. The ticket system in single player involves you working your way up through harder and harder races, each ticket providing a few races you must perform well in to unlock new tickets. Each race on a ticket will have a predetermined course, preselected vehicles for your opponents, and will usually force you into a vehicle type as well, and while there are some where you can drive whatever you please, these restrictions are where MotorStorm manages to avoid feeling incredibly repetitive. A bike drives much differently from a semi, and a buggy and an ATV will take jumps and handle mud in different ways, so by locking you into one vehicle choice for the race, you will have to consider the course’s design and learn how your vehicle can best handle it. Sometimes you will be up against a bunch of the same vehicle type and can learn from their choices, but other times you might be the odd one out or have unusual competitors. A race with everyone on motorbikes can be disrupted by one computer controlled opponent dominating the tight quarters of a place like Mudpool with a big rig. The pros and cons of each vehicle can require different strategies to remain competitive in these tickets, and while it can’t make up for seeing repeat runs of The Grizzly before you’ve even seen all of the eight tracks, there are at least appreciable differences between the race structures to keep the action varied.

The seven vehicles on offer do all feel rather distinct despite a few seeming like they’d play similarly. The two-wheel bikes have a clear maneuverability and speed advantage with their ability to zip into tight spaces and take jumps easily, but they are also easily bullied by every other vehicle type and struggle heavily with the rugged and muddy terrain they need to work extra to avoid. ATVs benefit from having four wheels and more traction, but the rally car brings much more survivability and raw speed to the table. Buggies are built better for jumps and uneven ground than something like the mud plugger, but that vehicle type can push through mud and other racers with almost no concern. Racing trucks bring speed to the heavier end of the vehicle spectrum, but if you want to dominate space a big rig demands everyone around it to be careful while still being able to keep up if the right routes are traveled. Even when you get to pick which vehicle you take to a race, it might not be a straightforward weighing of stats because of the way your rivals might play. While it certainly seems like you’ll be picking the speedy stuff once you’ve played the courses enough to understand them, there is still one more aspect of MotorStorm that impacts the play quite heavily.

 

Boosting is a key part of every race you participate in and the relationship the different vehicles have with it can determine how well you do in a specific leg of the course. Boosting is meant to be done pretty liberally, and while you’ll need to give it time to refill between boosts, you can string together small ones or go whole hog depending on what lies ahead. A big speed boost down a straightaway is a smart choice at times, but if there is a difficult section where you need to weave around rocks or roadblocks, having the boost available can let you tighten some turns or allow you to make up for any lost speed that came from having to briefly drive more cautiously. Boosts are available often enough they can just be used as necessary speed boosts but also give you another way to strategize on how you navigate the course. While the mud deformation is a neat gimmick, it is one that can be avoided in many areas, and thus the boost allows the game to continue to ask more from the player than just having the best route picked for your vehicle type. You’ll need to boost to keep up with other racers, to take certain shortcuts, to potentially ram an opponent into an obstacle, or give a somewhat unwieldy vehicle a way to take a turn without losing too much speed. In multiplayer and Time Attack, reactive play and a good boosting strategy are just as important as track knowledge and vehicle familiarity, so there is plenty to consider in MotorStorm even though you can definitely still get the expected thrill of maneuvering dangerous roads at high speed.

THE VERDICT: While MotorStorm’s selection of eight courses can feel a little slight at times, the variety in them allows each to feel different and the vehicle offerings make the small amount of content feel like much less of a problem. The seven vehicles all play differently and the interactions between them allow for races that feel distinct and ask for more from the player than just track knowledge. Managing your boost keeps the moment to moment play engaging as well, and with the dangerous course design constantly pushing you to squeeze out whatever edge you can gain, the game manages to be action-packed and thrilling despite the reliance on recontextualizing familiar content rather than providing new experiences.

 

And so, I give MotorStorm for PlayStation 3…

A GOOD rating. With perhaps double the amount of courses, the 65 ticket races of single player would definitely feel fresher, but MotorStorm knew how to still keep its limited amount of content interesting just by mixing around its variables often enough. The right vehicle arrangement on the right course requires a new brand of thinking than before, and success requires that flexibility on top of having things down like maneuvering the vehicle properly and applying your boosts at the best times. If you don’t like one of the courses it can be upsetting to see it crop up again and again, but there is still enough challenge in trying to mix together your understanding of good driving techniques and the layout of a level to provide not only high octane action but play that rewards skill and thought. The mudding, extreme sports, and soundtrack filled with metal and hard rock give the impression of mindless action-focused racing, but you can have your thrills while continuing to influence the action with well planned maneuvers and the proper use of a vehicle’s advantages.

 

MotorStorm isn’t intellectual or brainless. You get your gritty crash-filled action but can be rewarded for figuring out how the game works and the tricks to each course, and that’s what puts it above a simple racing sim. A greater degree of true variety would do wonders for the systems in play rather than just putting different groupings of vehicles on familiar tracks, but what is here can definitely carry its weight thanks to smart recontextualization. It is not quite what the exaggerated videos of the MotorStorm Festival might promise, but it’s definitely a thrilling motorsports game all the same.