Fun game with great gameplay.

User Rating: 8.5 | MotorStorm: Apocalypse PS3
This is the first Motorstorm game I've ever played and I have to say that I'm very impressed with how this game turned out. MS:A somehow reminds me of the 90s arcade racers with it's simplicity, as there are only 2 game modes: Festival and Wreckreation, which stands for the career and arcade modes; respectively. The Festival mode is divided into three episodes: rookie, pro, and veteran, each representing a character from the...."story", and each episode is comprised of 3 days, each divided into dawn, noon and dusk. The career mode opens with an incredibly awesome intro credit sequence where you and a bunch of other fellow competitors, race through a long stretch of highway full of destruction and chaos, giving you an impressive glimpse into what you will be encountering later on in the game. In fact, each episode begins with a sequence similar to this one, and ends with an equally spectacular exit sequence where you have to escape the city before the time limit runs out. The track design in this game is phenomenal and offers plenty of shortcuts, side routes and opportunities for you to ram opponents into obstacles, and vice-versa. Also, there is never a moment when the game stops throwing things at you, the environment seems to be hell-bent on stopping you from finishing the race, and as the race continues, the tracks change, creating new shortcuts and jumps but also severing other routes, making the game that much harder, and more fun. The vehicle selection is great as there is everything from ATVs and motorbikes to monster trucks and muscle cars, each with 3 different choices of models to unlock in Wreckreation mode. All of the vehicles handle nicely and sound fantastic, although if you're looking for realistic driving physics, you might want to buy Gran Turismo 5 or Forza instead. The one big thing I do not like about this game is predictably what everyone else happens to not like about it: the lame story. Frankly, I don't even bother with it, and even if the game did manage to have a decent story, the cutscenes are so lousily animated that they're physically painful for me to watch. Also, none of the characters were particularly likeable in the first place, most of which are highly forgettable and obnoxious. But with that said, who cares? Who the hell plays racing games for the story anyways?

To sum it up, Motorstorm: Apocalypse is a great racing game with heart-pounding action, superb graphics and filled to the brim with enough mayhem and destruction to put a smile on the face of even the most rigid of sim-racing fanatics. Overall, a must-buy for people who like to have fun when they play games.(I haven't played the online mode yet so I will modify my review as soon as I'm done with that)