Motorstorm (PS3)
Developer: Evolution Studios
Platform: PS3
Release Date: TBA
The trailer for MotorStorm that debuted at last year's Electronic Entertainment Expo was arguably every bit as impressive as the one for Killzone 2, and the fact that neither game put in an appearance at Sony's pre-E3 conference was definitely disappointing. Evolution Studios' off-road racer was mentioned in the press pack for that event, though, and while its appearance at the show in playable demo form was undoubtedly in question at some point, it ended up having one of the strongest showings of any PlayStation 3 game there. The demo featured only a single track and one playable vehicle, but very few of the attendees we saw playing the game were content with playing just one race--ourselves included.
Although it might easily be mistaken for a garden variety off-road racer at first glance, MotorStorm does a number of things that distinguish it from the competition. For starters, there are very few racing games that can pit radically different vehicles against each other without using artificial speed inhibitors or boosts to balance their performance. MotorStorm's seemingly excellent vehicle balancing is achieved, at least in the E3 demo, through the alternate routes available to each vehicle in the game, allowing bikers to use ramps and narrow ledges to stay high above the track being churned up by larger vehicles, for example. The fact that the track conditions alter with every lap is also a great feature for a racing game because, lets face it, lap-based racers invariably feel a little repetitive at some point--it's in their nature. In MotorStorm the tracks get more slippery when mud is thrown onto them and the surfaces get more uneven as larger vehicles plough them up. Oh, and did we mention that MotorStorm is also fun? That's a quality sometimes overlooked in the genre that seems increasingly concerned with realism.
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