“Muddy hell,” I thought the first time I roared around one of Motorstorm’s bruising tracks, “this is racing!” Evolution’s next-gen debut is like a boxing match in a bouncy castle.
Motorstorm casts you as a competitor in a racing festival, and the excellent splash screens and sledgehammer soundtrack further that atmosphere. But instead of continuing to the racing, you’ll find a tired and tested ‘win this, unlock this’ formula rather than a coherent tournament structure.
However, once you’ve slept through the loading times on the vehicle select screen, any other concerns about the game are swept away as the klaxxon sounds. Your senses will be hard pushed to take in everything on offer – from the astonishing physicality of the graphics to the pulse-pounding nature of the music – while you try to navigate the tracks and other racers.
It’s here that Evolution’s achievement in crafting a launch title of such quality is most evident; The grin on your face will be as big as some of the jumps the vehicles fly off and you can’t help but think that’s the way they wanted it. It’s as though Evolution have buried the corpses of all those other sterile racing games in the desert, and then built Motorstorm tracks on top just to rub it in.
The beautifully violent slow-mo crash replays are as fun to watch as the game is to play. And given the overly generous nature of the catch-up code, it’s worth crashing a few times on purpose, knowing you’re unlikely to be left with no chance of victory. The flip-side is that a seemingly impenetrable lead can evaporate on a last-corner crash, as vehicles that were surely out of sight come screaming across the line to deny you victory. But take it online and play without catch-up and it’s a different game again, often more aggressive and violent, but that trademark grin-inducing gameplay is intact.
The trend for expanding on games is continued here, with the recent addition of a Time Attack mode showing Evolution’s commitment to the game, and this bodes well for Sony’s network aspirations. Paid-for content can’t be far behind, but if it maintains this quality then there’ll be no problem opening your wallet again.
As a launch title, Motorstorm is the best justification for buying a PS3 there is. It does everything brilliantly and when you start racing it gets even better. If this is what Evolution can do within the constraints of a launch title, then the future of PS3 gaming is brighter than the Monument Valley sun.
