MotorStorm: Pacific Rift (PlayStation 3)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 4.0 stars Excellent
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 8.0 (4.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Kevin VanOrd
• Reviewed on: 10/23/2008
• Released on: 10/28/2008
• Originally published on GameSpot: MotorStorm: Pacific Rift (PlayStation 3) Review

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift is a rush, which should come as no surprise to fans of its predecessor. It's rip-roaring fun to speed through fields of sugarcane and race dangerously close to a cliff's rocky edge in your buggy all while avoiding the deep treads of a monster truck ramming you from behind. This is the Motorstorm experience, first delivered in last year's fun--but stripped--off-road racer. Pacific Rift is more of the same from a gameplay perspective, but it throws in twice the number of tracks, a new vehicle type, and a more fully featured multiplayer experience. But it's not all about quantity: Some of the new courses are dazzling and, in many cases, far exceed the quality of the original's courses. A few nagging issues remain, but for the most part, you'll get your money's worth out of this great sequel.

As in the original Motorstorm, you begin each race by choosing a vehicle type and then dashing through an expansive off-road course against up to 11 other vehicles. Because each vehicle has its own strengths and weaknesses (motorbikes are quick to turn but vulnerable to crashes; big rigs are relatively slow but can plow their way through thick underbrush), courses feature a number of different routes to the finish line. It's up to you, through trial and error, to figure out which route best suits your chosen vehicle. You'll also use that knowledge to your advantage while avoiding the ferocity of your opponents--and exercising yours upon them.

Describing tracks as intricate actually sells many of them short. There are 16 of them in all, eight more than in the original's release, and some of them are mind-bogglingly clever. Perhaps the best of these is Sugar Rush, a high-speed romp through a sugar plantation that takes you through a cluttered factory and into its lush fields. The ramps are narrow while the turns are sharp, and the robust physics may cause a crate or random tire to get in your way where there hadn't been one before. It's also a tough course with multiple potential paths, and one in which a single mistake within the factory's claustrophobic spaces can cost you the race. On Beachcomber, a sprint across the white sands of a Pacific island getaway is complicated by marshes that get muddier as vehicles drive through them, soaring jumps, and thick vegetation. Even some of the less complex courses, such as Cascade Falls, are a joy to navigate thanks to the varied scenery, a great sense of speed, and significant differences between the branching paths. The high quality of these tracks makes other tracks look downright simple, such as the straightforward race through rocky gorges and mossy caves known as Razorback, or the minimalist watery environs of Colossus Canyon.

Some of the courses turn the spotlight on Pacific Rift's boost function. You can give yourself a kick of speed using nitro boost, but you can't use it too liberally, lest you overheat and explode. A few courses take you near burning pits of lava that further increase this risk but also scatter sprinkler showers about the track, letting you cool off your seared mudplugger. The Scorched track makes brilliant use of this mechanic, combining seemingly endless forks and burning straightaways into a fun ride. Of course, you'll not only struggle with the challenge of the courses themselves, but also with the aggressiveness of other drivers. Using a shoulder button, you can ram into other vehicles, which is a particular delight when behind the wheel of a big rig or monster truck. It's less exciting when you're driving a defenseless ATV and must cope with a crowd of vehicles at a course bottleneck--or dealing with an AI that ignores the best route for its vehicle in favor of forcing you over a cliff.

You will run into some other frustrations, though these aren't frequent and are a by-product of Pacific Rift's loose physics model, which usually makes for rough-and-tumble fun but can be a little too sensitive for its own good. You might crash for no apparent reason when hitting the bottom of a ramp or simply driving from one surface onto another, even when it looks like a clearly even transition and is one you've made a dozen times before without issues. Vehicle handling is also loose, which makes for impossibly high jumps, but also means that making contact with so much as a pebble could cause your buggy to launch into a series of somersaults. This is the case even with large vehicles, such as the new top-heavy monster truck, which feels less solid than you might imagine. These issues are generally avoidable if you have an error-free race, but it does bring a philosophical discrepancy to the forefront: Many of these design elements encourage crashing, but they also demand racing perfection if you want to finish in the top three--a dichotomy with which the game never quite comes to grips.

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MotorStorm: Pacific Rift (PlayStation 3): $56.99 - $59.99

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