MotorStorm RC: Complete Edition (PS3)

When video game consoles started to embrace digital downloads and storefronts, it became safer to release cheaper and smaller titles, even ones carrying the name of a well respected franchise. While MotorStorm isn’t the kind of series that has much pull outside of the racing game scene, there had already been four major installments that focused on taking a variety of cars to tracks focused on different types of off-road racing. After exploring the potential of racing through mud, sand, snow, and rubble, MotorStorm saw the potential for a smaller racing title and decided to literally shrink its race cars and tracks as well. Rather than racing vehicles that realistically reacted to the environment, the newly created MotorStorm RC would instead have remote-controlled toy cars compete with far less concern about the terrain underneath their tires.

 

With the race tracks being tightly packed to match this new artistic direction, MotorStorm RC: Complete Edition makes sure that the controls are tight enough that you can take the sometimes sharp turns while avoid crashing into barriers or going too far off road. Before you even get to race the game takes some time acclimating you to the simple but smooth racing mechanics in a simple tutorial. With proper management of your speed and brakes you can take turns differently, the vehicles able to drift if you swing their bodies around the right way so you can tighten up your movement or avoid losing too much speed. Many of the courses are designed heavily around being able to handle a variety of different turn types, the intricacies of getting your car to move exactly how you like fluid but never too simple that you can sit back and breeze through the game’s many challenges. Luckily, the game does offer some control and perspective options to help players who are either more familiar with RC racing games or the MotorStorm series. You can choose to move your car like a real vehicle by matching your control stick motions with how you want the tires to turn or you can lean into more RC focused ideas like pointing the stick in the direction you wish to move and accommodating your car’s current position with how you ease into the directional shift. With the player able to zoom the camera in and out depending on if they value total track knowledge, clearer immediate considerations, or just want to better align with their chosen control method, MotorStorm RC: Complete Edition ensures that you can find a way to play that will feel natural to you eventually even if you need to spend some time just messing around in the hub area learning the ropes.

Once you are ready to race though, MotorStorm RC: Complete Edition takes a very fun angle with how it designs its tracks. The Festival campaign has its tracks divided into six sets, with the first four of them all based on previous MotorStorm titles. Four tracks are based on the original MotorStorm‘s dusty canyons and muddy roads, MotorStorm: Pacific Rift’s contributions focus on the beaches and volcanic rock of an island setting, icy roads and mountainsides fill out the four courses representing MotorStorm: Arctic Edge, and the destroyed cities of MotorStorm: Apocalypse’s disaster-afflicted setting add a more urban angle to its associated courses. Two more track sets were actually originally downloadable content you had to buy separately, but the Complete Edition allows you to play the RC Pro-Am level set with four levels that lean into the skate park hub area of this very game while the RC Carnival’s atypical six tracks simply pull in an amusement park setting because it seems like a fun idea for some special set pieces like a water slide.

 

While RC Pro-Am’s levels can feel a little basic compared to the levels that aren’t trying to hew close to real RC racing, most of the tracks on offer mix good track design with fun concepts. Ice Breaker will have you sliding up the side of a ship wreck, Road Block has a street ruined by an earthquake form ramps and uneven ground, Charred Rock Cafe takes place beside a restaurant caught in a magma flow, and Scrap Heap has you weaving between piles of junk at a junkyard. While some tracks do borrow their names straight from the games that inspired them, the levels are far too small to imitate those long and winding courses with their shortcuts and multiple paths to the finish line. Instead, it’s all about learning the layout of a course and making sure you drift and release at the right points to preserve your speed in a safe manner. In Wreckreation you are free to play these courses solely for the goal of setting the best times and learning the ins and outs of these brilliant bite-sized raceways, but no matter the mode there are some issues with visual clarity. First and foremost it can be hard to even realize which way an RC car is facing when the race is about to start until you’ve familiarized yourself with them, and even when you’re driving, some levels have you go under overpasses or race in dark or overly detailed conditions that can make it easy to briefly lose track of your vehicle. It’s the kind of visual confusion that fades once you have played for a while, but it also can’t be said to ever go away one-hundred percent.

The Festival mode that is the game’s main focus doesn’t just want you to spend all your time racing through the same set of courses a specific MotorStorm game inspired one after the other though. To make progress in the game’s main campaign you need to earn medals by performing well in different challenges across the different track sets. The challenges you unlock jump between game groupings so you never settle into one aesthetic or course set for too long, and the challenges themselves aren’t all straightforward races either. On top of the regular Race design, there are three more ways to compete for the medals needed to unlock more challenges. Hot Lap will have you race on a course free of other competitors, your goal being to set the best single lap time you can. An unobtrusive line will show you both how the times you’re trying to beat navigated the course and your own best driving for the challenge so far, with Hot Lap sometimes proving very difficult in courses where the goal requires extremely tight movement to set the record. Pursuit is almost like a race but rather than running three laps your goal is to get ahead of a bunch of other vehicles that are already driving. Pursuit adds in other drivers as small goalposts to tell you how well you’re doing while also making them physical dangers if you don’t account for their movement, and again this mode can start to get really hard in the later challenges thanks to the increasing demands and having its own tight time limits for how quickly you need to pass everyone up.

 

Luckily, many of the early challenges are easy enough and will ease you into learning the game, and technically you can continue to unlock new challenges by settling for different medal benchmarks. Each challenge type can earn you up to three medals based on the times you need to beat or placements you need to earn, and while unlocking every challenge and vehicle requires earning them all, you can settle for fewer medals in a particularly hard challenge if it’s stonewalling you. By the time the game cranks up the difficulty some though it introduces the last challenge type: Drift. This mode plays very differently in that you are now focusing on earning points by maintaining drifts and chaining them together in the courses that are really conducive to such stylish driving. The player must avoid straightening out or crashing while weaving through the designs of these race tracks expertly to even have a small hope of hitting the three medal requirement of scoring high points in a short amount of time. If you had managed to get by without drifting up until these appear though this mode is the perfect way to learn how to integrate them in regular racing, this allowing you to keep up with the increasing difficulty in the other challenge types available at the time.

 

The final important detail about MotorStorm RC: Complete Edition is that it does carry over the main series’s focus on having multiple vehicle types all compete in the same events. While there are no motorbikes and the big rigs hardly feel like the unwieldy powerhouses they would be at full size, there are clear differences in speed and control between all the racing options. Wreckreation lets you pick the vehicle you use for the track, but Festival locks you into one it has decided on for the challenge and can even set opposing racers to different types so that you need to find your own method of achieving victory rather than just copying the other drivers. Buggies are rather fast but easy to spin out if you drift too aggressively while Muscle Cars are practically built for smooth drifting. Rally Cars can be a bit unwieldy but make up for it with their incredible speed, SuperMinis feel like a nice middle ground, but Racing Trucks feel like pokey beasts meant to deliberately hamper your chances of victory. Monster Trucks can handle being in a cluster of vehicles better by going over the competition, but the unlockable Supercars definitely shine as they combine speed with control for the final challenges you face in the Festival. While some of the cars definitely settle into an accessible middle ground, you will definitely feel the difference when you have one of the feistier car designs in your hands. The fact that you need to adjust your track knowledge and turning tactics for these different vehicles once again helps MotorStorm RC: Complete Edition avoid feeling repetitive, something it does better than even the original MotorStorm game despite now focusing on toy cars.

THE VERDICT: Tight remote-controlled racing shines brightly in MotorStorm RC: Complete Edition, the compact courses really requiring a player to get a hang of the driving to succeed in the campaign mode’s smooth but challenging difficulty curve. Some little quirks in the visuals lead to some diminished clarity for tracks that otherwise do a lot to vary things visually and demand different approaches to taking turns, but the Festival mode’s different challenge types spice up repeated visits to the game’s set of 26 courses. Different vehicles ask you to adjust how you play so you won’t be breezing through challenges even after you know a track well, MotorStorm RC: Complete Edition assuring it remains a quality RC racer throughout by shuffling its variables around in consistently engaging ways.

 

And so, I give MotorStorm RC: Complete Edition for PlayStation 3…

A GOOD rating. With a bit more visual clarity and perhaps some more of the gimmicks it chose not to carry over from the other MotorStorm titles, MotorStorm RC: Complete Edition could quite easily move up a rating as it is a game that doesn’t do much wrong within its genre design. The levels are a good fit for the responsive driving and drift mechanics, the different vehicles have an appreciable effect on how the races unfold, and the mission designs change up your goals while still cultivating the same set of skills. Remote-controlled racers often throw in some sort of extra gimmick like items to get around the fact small and simple course design can’t quite match the potential large tracks have for shortcuts and varied racing tactics, but MotorStorm RC: Complete Edition keeps its focus on mastering the RC controls and can provide an exhilarating challenge as you push closer and closer to clearing a hard Hot Lap or hitting the score quotas in a Drift challenge. Theming the levels around the previous games in the franchise is a cute touch and one that allows the game to have some helpful visual variety despite the rare moment it obscures some vital information, so besides having the environment more directly impact you, the courses are both interesting to look at and fun to race in despite a few plainer ideas like the Pro-Am skate park stages.

 

MotorStorm RC: Complete Edition, despite being a small title that took things in a new gameplay direction, also serves as a love letter to the MotorStorm series. The smooth controls ensure it is difficult but rewarding, but the sad thing is that the MotorStorm development team was dissolved entirely a few years after this entry, leaving MotorStorm RC as the last game in the series. It captures many of the racing franchise’s appeals though while still doing something different from the previous titles, so while it may be a shame the series had to end at all, at least they wrapped things up with an exciting little capstone that brought a lot of creativity and craftsmanship to a game about racing remote-controlled toys.