MotorStorm Pacific Rift Hands-On Preview

We've toured Hawaii in a fresh build of Evolution's sequel.

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By Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, September 16, 2008

An acquaintance recently described Motorstorm as the "anti-Gran-Turismo." There are several racers who could lay claim to such a title, but Evolution's mud-swilling, piston-pounding off-road IP fills it out especially well. Despite some irksome rubber-band AI and the absence of split-screen multiplayer, Motorstorm came out near the head of the pack of (admittedly underwhelming) PlayStation 3 launch titles, maintaining a respectable 82% Metacritic average and notching up almost three and a half million sales worldwide.

Naturally Sony wasn't about to let such a retail powerhouse roar off into the bushes, so here we are with a preview build of Motorstorm: Pacific Rift, which transfers the action from the Technicolor canyons and balloon-spotted vistas of Monument Valley to the sun, sand and sugar plantations of a tropical island chain.

The jump-start no-frills racing model returns largely unaltered, with victory being a matter of judicious boosting, lining up those corners and matching the right set of wheels to the right path through each multi-tiered circuit. The ferocious rival AI seldom gives you leisure to nail a perfect line, doing its best to shunt you off cliffs or into trackside hazards when you overtake. Given such touchy opposition, it's tempting to hurry through the throng by thumbing down the boost, but beware - boost too much and your engine will detonate, which tends to put a bit of a crimp on your podium chances.

Boosting has become a slightly more convoluted business due to the inclusion of fire and water hazards. The former will cause you to overheat quicker, obviously enough, which makes the likes of the Wildfire circuit with its plethora of lava flow jumps a hair-raising prospect; the latter will cool you off but hamper your progress. This amounts to more than simply slowing you down a tad: water has its own momentum and buoyancy is a factor. Bikes and ATVs will find themselves literally out of their depth, thrown by the current, while surefooted big rigs plough comfortably through.

Persistent track deformation, a much-hyped attribute of the original, has grabbed fewer headlines this time round but can still decisively affect your progress. As the horde of vehicles tears up the circuit, once-virgin swathes of jungle floor or beachside plateau will become treacherous mudslicks, defying all but the most tenacious of vehicles to stay on course. If you're packing something flimsy it's often safest to seek alternative routes on your second lap. Pacific Rift also chucks in more in the way of destructible track furniture, from guard rails along bridges to entire houses which can be brought crashing down on racers to the rear. Some routes are obscured by thick vegetation, such as a sugar cane field at harvest time: again, if you're on a bike or ATV you'll struggle - unless you stick close behind a roadster with greater penetrating power.

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