Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

One of the first games shown for the Playstation 3 at E3 was MotorStorm.  It was a pre-rendered video that showed mud-crusted racers tearing through a desert landscape, vehicles ripping into pieces as they collided with each other.  The footage ended with a truck doing and end-over-end flip careening towards a recovering motorcycle driver.  The video was meant to demonstrate what the Playstation 3 was capable of delivering to the freshly-announced system, but the mainstream press instead chose to focus on the fact that it was pre-rendered.

Shortly after the launch of the Playstation 3 a demo for MotorStorm hit the Playstation Network.  People were amazed with the graphics of the game, the real-time deformation of the track, and the fantastic use of the Havok engine to send wreckage everywhere when a racer lost control of their vehicle.  I’ve had a few days to sit down with the final version of the game to really sink my tires into the mud to see what this game is made of.  Will the game cross the finish line intact, or will it get stuck in the mud until the wheels tear off?

Evolution Studios put a great deal of work into the graphic engine for MotorStorm.  Once they got the look they were shooting for, they layered the Havok engine through the entire process until the game turned into the high-speed demolition derby that you’ll see in the final product.  Hitting a solid object and ripping your vehicle apart is a vicious ballet of mechanical destruction, flinging parts of your undercarriage, body, tires, and more in every direction.  The details strewn about the hyper-realistic landscape are many, and you’ll see them frequently as your vehicle is more than fragile.

As your race through the varied courses of the map, you’ll see that each area is based on realistic vistas and dangerous mesas, but that is not where the game shines most - MotorStorm is all about mud and dirt. As you drive around the dirt tracks you’ll stir up dust and debris that will slowly come to rest on the wheel wells of your vehicle.  As cool as that is, it is nothing compared to when the track is wet.  Mud sticks to every surface, coating driver and drive train alike in a thick and cumulative sludge.  As your race progresses, you’ll see the Havok engine in action again.  While your vehicle starts off pristine and clean, you’ll take small bits of damage as you nudge opponent drivers.  Rolling the vehicle will create a great deal of damage, dislodging your tailgate, pieces of your vehicle body, or bending your tires until they wobble.

Pushing your vehicle to the limits (or pushing your vehicle into a wall) will cause the vehicle to completely fail, exploding into many pieces.  When this happens, the game gives you a nice slow motion view as your vehicle explodes.  Shortly after this slow motion scene you’ll re-appear on the track, fully intact once again, albeit probably in a slot closer to the back of the pack. 

It isn’t all sunshine and mud flaps with the graphics in MotorStorm – there are a few hitches that should be noted.  The mud in the game deforms in real time, but it seems that all of it has been coated with a nice shiny wax.  Mud can be dull and flat in real life, but it seems that Evolution went a bit heavy with the reflective surfaces, which often gives a bit of a shiny look.  Additionally, and often when interacting with mud or during explosions, you’ll see a bit of a framerate hitch.  It doesn’t often affect gameplay, but does underscore how hard the game is pushing the engine.  You’ll also see a few instances where pop-in occurs in the distance, which is odd given that this happens in areas where you’d expect an item to be relatively static.  The only theory I can muster is that it didn’t quite load the object quick enough, and ‘phoned it in’ as you drove by.  Another area that can sometimes seem a bit off is the shadowing.  While the lighting engine in the game is top-notch, it seems that the edges of shadows are more jagged than they should be – something you’ll probably spot during the slow motion crashes. None of these things are going to ruin the experience by any means though, and you shouldn’t let that stop you from marveling at just how gorgeous this game really looks.

There is a distinct advantage to having the power of Sony in your corner – it means that you also have the power of Sony’s music brands in your corner as well.  MotorStorm takes advantage of this relationship very well with tracks from Curve, Elite Force, Gluecifer, Hyper, Krafty Kuts, Monster Magnet, Nirvana, Primal Scream, Queens of the Stone Age, Reverend Horton Heat, Slipknot, Wolfmother, and more.  In fact, the music tracks in the game provide a good rock background to the fast-running action of the game.  You’ll recognize some of these tracks from The Matrix soundtrack, as well as quite a few mainstream tracks that you have probably heard on the radio.  It is a nice element to a racing game that might have otherwise had generi-rock.  With such a widely cast soundtrack, there are bound to be a few tracks that you won’t like, but that’d be the exception to the rule.

Similar to the soundtrack, the effects in the game are well executed.  I’m not sure if they were sampled, but that statement should tell you something – I can’t tell either way.  Every engine sounds slightly different, with the tires on gravel or mud sounds being even more convincing.  The tires in the game grip and tear at the various track surfaces in a realistic fashion.  The whole package comes together nicely and adds to the game nicely.

To talk about the control system for MotorStorm, we’ll break it into two sections – SIXAXIS use, and non-SIXAXIS use.  Leaving the tilt controls turned off, the controls are very simple.  The left analog or the D-Pad allows you to control your vehicle’s turning, as well as controlling yaw in the air, or weight shifting while you are on a bike.  The right analog gives you a quick-snapping camera that allows you to free-look all around your vehicle.  If you pause the game, you can use this free-camera to get a look at the action from any angle.  X allows you to activate boost, but be careful – it is limited and will blow up your engine if overused.  The O button will apply your handbrake, allowing you to power-brake around corners.  Square is used as an action button, but in the context of the game it is essentially a punch button while on a bike, or the horn while in an enclosed vehicle.  L2 and R2 are used as brakes and acceleration, respectively.  R3 gives you a very quick look straight behind you. 

When you enable the SIXAXIS controls (which you can toggle at any time using the start menu) you can control Pitch, Yaw, and Roll.  I was ultimately unsuccessful in fully utilizing the SIXAXIS controls.  I found that they were serviceable, but I was not as much in control as I needed to be to really execute the rolls midair controls without feeling like it was a little more frantic than you’d expect from a high-speed racer.

I’ll admit that my first brush with MotorStorm was not a good one.  I thought the game was as shallow as a kiddy pool as I was able to completely dominate the race in the demo, coming in 1st place on my first run through.  Repeat performances yielded the same results.  Getting my hands on the final version didn’t do much to change my mind for the first few tracks, but then things changed.

MotorStorm has a gentle learning curve.  The game evolves as you learn the tracks, and the game rewards you for putting in the effort.  As I moved into the latter tracks, I found that the different pathways, and the vehicles I chose to put on them, had a significant impact on the outcome of the race.  In fact, picking too heavy a vehicle and trying to take the high road on some of the tracks could easily result in your truck slipping off the track and off the edge of a very large cliff.  Granted, you will ‘reset’ after a moment, but you can bet that your competitors will capitalize on your ‘death’.  You’ll find that slipping off the track can easily result in losing 6 or 7 places in the race, giving you a hefty amount of ground to make up.  Learning the tracks can help you make up that ground as there are shortcuts throughout every track.  Sometimes what looks like a simpler route may in fact extend your path and put you behind other racers.  Similarly, choosing a more difficult route could put you a great deal ahead of your competitors.  You really won’t know until you put your tires on that path to test it out, and with so many paths to chose from, you probably won’t really know until you’ve tested it out multiple times.  Even then, the track can occasionally change, so the route you chose on lap 2 might not be there for lap 3. 

Choosing the right vehicle can have a large effect on your race.  There are 7 types of vehicles to choose from, including MX Bikes, Rally Cars, ATVs, Mudpluggers, and even Big Rigs.  The lighter vehicles are meant to take the narrow high paths, often jumping over other paths and racers in death defying leaps of faith.  The mud-encrusted lower areas are meant for more powerful vehicles like the Mudpluggers.  Are the other racers being a pain in your tailpipe?  Simply select the Big Rig and run them over.  All is fair in love, war, and mudboggin’.

Playing through the various tracks means unlocking the individual race tickets.  Each ticket has a certain number of races attached to it, with a total of 8 tracks to choose from.  The multiple routes give those 8 tracks some legs, but in the end, earning the 1300+ points throughout the game 30 points at time means playing the same tracks over and over again.  While you sometimes are restricted on which vehicles you can chose, it is essentially the same track.

This does bring me to my primary complaint with the game.  The Havok engine has been layered throughout the engine for this game, but sometimes it seems that it was inconsistently applied.  Sometimes your vehicle feels like it is made of Nerf as you can impact a wall at far too high a velocity only to be stopped dead in your tracks.  Sometimes you’ll clip another racer slightly and find yourself out of control and exploding into many pieces and wondering why the entire time.  Occasionally you’ll find that you hit some pebble or creaky board on a ramp and exploding on the spot.  It’s fun to watch your car explode, but it gets a bit frustrating when you can’t figure out why it happened.

Summing up MotorStorm is pretty easy – the game is balls to the wall high speed chaos on wheels.  The demo on the Playstation Network gives you a small (albeit a bit too easy) idea of what the full game has to offer.  If only there were a few more tracks to tear up.

A few folks on our forums jumped out and imported the Japanese version of MotorStorm.  The game suffered a few more framerate hitches and had no online options at all.  Wow did Japan get burned!  The online mode in MotorStorm absolutely rocks.  You can race with up to 11 other racers, which quickly devolves into a demolition derby shoving match.  Falling off a cliff or being forced into a wall has never been so enjoyable.  The same limits that handicap the single player game also handicap the multiplayer game.  You can race against other players in regular races, adjusting the time of day, restricting the vehicles players can chose, and turning off the catch-up logic. (which shouldn’t even be a feature of ANY racing game – if I’m winning, don’t cheat to beat me)  Unfortunately, you’ll still only have 8 tracks to play.  It gives a great deal of room to offer new tracks for download, but it does hamper the amount of replay value a bit.

A staple of racing games is a speed-racing mode.  What surprised me is that there is no speed mode where players could test out the tracks to see just how fast they could complete the lap.  In fact, the only options you have are the online mode and the career mode. 

The one final hit to the game is the painful loading sequences.  You ready to pick a vehicle and get to the track?  Nah, you’ll get to sit and watch the spinning loading icon and look at the empty mesa for a while.  Select the next vehicle?  Nah…sit a little longer.  It seems that 100% of the game is streamed from the disc, making the load times far longer than you’d expect from a hard drive-enabled platform.

So after much waiting we see the culmination of the hard work since E3.  The game is a hair-on-fire kind of racer, giving players the chance to race the short list of tracks in multiple ways and with multiple vehicles.  On the technical side, the framerate has been smoothed over since the Japanese release, and the addition of online multiplay ensures a much better final product for the U.S. version.  While it doesn’t even come close to the chaos of the pre-rendered footage we saw last May, it does deliver as a solid racer.  Pick up the demo and take it for a spin – you won’t be disappointed.

Gaming Trend Score

86

1. Graphics: 90
2. Audio: 93
3. Controls: 85
4. Gameplay: 85
5. Value/Replay: 75
6. OVERALL:86