Motorstorm has always been a criminally underrated series on PS3. Most of my friends picked up the console when Motorstorm was a pack-in, and none of them played it for more than ten minutes. They passed it off as a generic arcade racer, never giving it a second thought. It’s quite a shame; the first game was admittedly rushed to market (look at all of the DLC), but the second game, Pacific Rift, was a genuinely competent racing game. The chaos of so many divergent paths, hazards, and vehicles created a rush unlike any other, and the variety of it all gave the entire package of momentous legs. Motorstorm was become synonymous with quality, and I could only hope the recently announced PSP version, Arctic Edge, stayed consistent with the series’ value.
And, despite the visual downgrade, Motorstorm was still Motorstorm. All three courses in the E3 build, including Chasm, Mad Bowl, and Eagle Falls, all featured either a plethora of snow blanketing the ground, or ice mounds across a dirt ridges. The racing was fast and fun with the stock dune buggy, but I noticed the frenzied crashes were drastically reduced on the small screen (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). Boost seemed to result in a greater lack of control than usual, but it was still highly a highly effective at creating a risk/reward balance. Cooling down your boost is now down by driving through snow, which, in my experience, usually resulted in moderately reduced speed.
The vehicles were a mix of old and new. The aforementioned dune buggy was joined by the familiar “tank thing,” but new crafts, such as Jet Ski (like a personal watercraft with skis on the front), also made an appearance. The Jet Ski, in particular, summoned memories of Jet Moto, and the floaty controls did little to distance their feel from Singletrac’s late PS1 classic. Arctic Edge still has a long way to go; it’s penciled in for a release later this year,
