Intense Off Road Racing
One thing I always liked about Motorstorm was its focus on what it does best: intense off-road racing. I think it’s a credit to the developers that they haven’t tried to build really anything more than that into this series like story or characters. With Pacific Rift, the focus is once again on racing, and I think that’s great. When you fire it up, you’re presented with a menu and you have the option to take the race online with up to twelve other players, engage in free play, or partake in the Festival.
The Festival is Motorstorm’s equivalent of a campaign. Players begin by picking from one of a few included female or male drivers, and then it’s off to the races. In Pacific Rift, races and events take place across four different zones on a large volcanic island: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Each zone is made up of courses and events on those courses that cater to those elements in some way. For example, the Earth Zone will feature tracks deep in the heart of the jungle, so expect lots of thick foliage that can obscure your view as well as lots of mud. Courses on the Fire Zone like The Rift will get you close to the hot lava that will raise your engine temperature, forcing you to keep an extra eye on your Boost meter so you don’t blow your engine apart. The Air Zone includes tracks like Rain God Spires (the track from the downloadable demo) that invite high flyers to air it out. Lastly, the Water Zone includes tracks like Cascade Falls that feature plenty of water that can cool off your engine.
In terms of numbers, Pacific Rift features eight vehicle classes and a total of sixteen courses. Each Zone is accessible from the beginning and players will unlock more courses, events, vehicles, driver avatars, and various making of content as they progress. Progression is measured with a simple gauge; to begin with, for example, you need 400 points to unlock the next set of content. First place nets you 100, second 75, and third place 50. After achieving the set amount of points, you get your content and a new goal.
The variety of courses, event types, and vehicles keep things plenty fresh enough as you continue to play through the Festival. Races definitely get tougher, and you can get an idea of how hard a race will be by its Rank number that you can see before going in. Regardless, most races tend to be very close; I have lost four or five races by mere hundredths of a second. Other times, I’m a clear winner or dead last, but one thing that I have learned in Pacific Rift is that the race isn’t over until it’s over. Times when I thought I had definitely lost the race I ended up placing or even better finishing first. Other times when I thought I had a race in hand during the final seconds of the last lap, I wrecked. The fact that most races are done in well under four minutes reminds us of that fragile balance in which you don’t have a whole lot of time to really screw things up, but you also don’t have a lot of time to catch up and take first place, either.
Knowing your vehicle’s capabilities and the details of the course you’re running becomes essential later on in the Festival and when you play against others online. Vehicle types include a variety of two and four wheel motorbikes, dune buggies, rally cars, monster trucks, “mudpluggers,” and even heavy rock trucks. Different vehicle classes are able to perform differently on various types of terrain. Larger trucks can stream roll through any terrain including water, but other vehicles will slow down or even sink in water. At the same time larger vehicles sacrifice maneuverability, speed, and acceleration. Each vehicle type can be viewed in the Garage which is accessible during the Vehicle Selection screen before an event. You can view a vehicles ratings for things like Speed, Acceleration, Durability, and Maneuverability but you cannot alter any of these or upgrade your own vehicle. To some that may seem like just another drawback or restriction to Motorstorm, but I kind of like the pure simplicity of just being able to select a vehicle and go with it, without having to think about how and if I want to upgrade this feature or that.
Gameplay And Presentation
Motorstorm Pacific Rift plays a lot like its predecessor but the overall racing experience seemed more refined and tighter than the original. Players can choose from one of several control schemes, but the default scheme seems to be the best. Players can use either the d-pad or left thumbstick to move left or right, while pressing forward or back affects leaning on the two and four wheel motorcycles. Cyclists will also need to duck and make use of bunny hops, especially in the Earth Zone to avoid hitting trees and rocks; to duck you just double tap down on the d-pad and you press down-up to do a bunny hop, great for getting a little extra bounce out of a ramp or jump. You can attack with R1 and L1, but I haven’t found these too useful yet. Circle applies the hand brake which will lock out your back wheels, great for power sliding in conjunction with Boost, and L2 is your normal brake. Triangle switches you from a third person and first person view. Pressing X turns on your Boost, which is a wonderfully simple feature in that it never runs out unless you hold it down and blow out your engine, in which case you’re going to be reset on the track anyway. Otherwise, Boost is a great tool and a nice element to the game, especially with the new water and fire modifiers you come across during racing that affect the temperature of your engine and therefore your Boost meter.
Courses in Motorstorm generally offer several routes for players to choose from but may require a certain vehicle type to make use of. For example, you may need to make a big jump or travel through water to make use of a shortcut, and not all vehicles are going to be capable of doing that. Knowing what vehicle works where in each course is something for the truly faithful to figure out, but for me I’ll take my chances with my trusty buggy as long as I can.
Other event types include checkpoint races where you go from checkpoint to checkpoint in a race against the clock. There are also Eliminator matches that are a lot of fun; in these, a timer goes off every ten or so seconds and who ever is in last place when the timer goes off gets blown up and is out of the race. It’s kind of like an aggressive knockout mode if you will, and it’s definitely intense. Examples of more events include challenges on completing a race in a given amount of time as well as meeting a crash criteria, whereby you must crash less than the allowable amount.
Intensity is the name of the game for Motorstorm Pacific Rift; the action is fast, fun, and at some point you’re going to have to risk it to win it. In any event, you’re going to wreck, either because some monster truck crushed you or you smashed into a rock; sometimes these wrecks are just plan cool, and to that end there is a Photo Mode that you can access from the pause menu to capture that glorious moment to share with others. Taking a picture of your character as he flies out of his vehicle can help ease the pain of a tough wreck that may very well have just cost you a first place finish.
Outside of wrecking when you least want to (okay, maybe you never want to), Motorstorm Pacific Rift is a lot of fun, and wrecking is just part of the game anyway. Even when you do wreck, as unlikely as placing might seem, it’s still worth finishing the race in the Festival because you just never know what might happen. Still, restarting a race doesn’t incur any load times at all, so that’s good to know, too. So that said, tearing up the trails on this volcanic island is a hell of a lot of fun thanks to good course design, challenging AI, tight controls, and variety of vehicle types.
As far as sights and sounds, Pacific Rift looks great. Perhaps most importantly, the framerate stays very high and smooth even with a dozen vehicles racing closely on screen. Textures looks solid with the exception of a few water puddles that just didn’t look right. I really liked a lot of the backgrounds and effects too, like the sun popping on screen as you clear a hill or the dense smoke or fog obscuring your view and the blurry look of water on your screen after driving under a waterfall. Sound effects are almost exclusively the roar of engines, and then the sudden lack thereof when you wreck, while the soundtrack features a lot of popular artists that get overshadowed by the in game effects, which I think is great anyway as I prefer to hear the engines instead of the radio music.
I haven’t spent much time online with Pacific Rift, but what I have played was very smooth. Players can host or join races with up to twelve racers and either select matches or let the matchmaking service handle that for you.
And with that, let’s wrap up…