Videogame review: Motorstorm Apocalypse

The crazy drivers from Motorstorm are back and this time they are racing trough a natural disaster of apocalyptic proportions.

The Motorstorm franchise has always been based on a very daft but extremely enjoyable game play. Various vehicles (cars, bikes, monster trucks etc.) racing trough improbable but very scenic places. It always had a very cinematic quality, particularly with the famous slow motion crash sequences.

Apocalypse is the natural evolution of that. The tracks are crazier than ever, a couple of times you get to race on top of various buildings, jumping from one to the other. The cataclysmatic setting permits alteration to the track in real time, during the race. For example a building can fall on your car, part of the road can explode, a whirlwind can invade the track.

This is all really as awesome as it sounds. The races assume a cinematic quality typical of movies and they are all so much tighter. From an hardcore point of view this means that they are also harder to perfect. You can’t simply learn the optimal path and then repeat it for every lap, now you have to learn the optimal path for each different lap because it changes all the time. Probably knowing this the difficulty of the normal arcade mode as been much lowered so it’s realy only a problem for the completists who want to do the game on a higher difficulty setting.

There is an overall back story, played trough the game with same animated comics. It’s a really really stupid one, when it tries for dramatic it is terrible but most of the times it’s there just to have a laugh and rest the joypad. They even show a retro version of an hypothetical 80s version of the game!

Overall the game is much more streamlined. You don’t have to do a race over and over the get a ticket for the next event like in pacific rift but if you want you can perfect yourself to get tickets for special event and various stuff. This way it neatly divides to casual from the hardcore.

If you own a PS3 this is a must get, maybe the funnies game in the franchise so far.