I would have thought a PSP motorstorm game would just be a stripped down motorstorm experience... how wrong I was!
Well Arctic Edge certainly lives up to the Motorstorm game, and this is certainly no stripped down game. For those familiar with previous Motorstorm games (mainly Pacific Rift), there is the festival mode (the career mode), and "Wreckreation" which is where the multiplayer and free play modes are.
The Festival mode works in class levels, with each level you progress, more races become unlocked to you. You earn the progression of levels by earning points from races (100 for gold, 75 for silver, and 50 for bronze). You need to get an increasingly large amount of points to increase your level for each level.
Arctic Edge has a much nicer learning curve than previous Motorstorm games, starting you off in very easy races, and slowly raising the difficulty with each level you increase, though towards the very very end of the game, the races can get very difficult, seemingly impossible. Arctic Edge can be very addictive, with a large range of varied tracks; each with lots of different routes and short cuts, just like in previous Motorstorm games.
You will be spending most of your time in the Festival mode where you unlock more vehicles as you go, and even, for the first time in Motorstorm games, you will unlock cosmetic upgrades for your vehicles, so you can customise just how you want your vehicle to look! These have no effect on how the vehicle performs, but you can save these customisations, and even take them online with you and race with your personally customised vehicles.
Vehicles are split between the classes: bikes, quad bikes, snowmobiles, buggies, rally cars, snow pluggers, big rigs, and also snow cats (big treaded vehicles with snow ploughs). Each class has 3 different vehicles in it, so there is a total of 24 unique vehicles in this game, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
The online play on Arctic Edge is just as good as the ps3 Motorstorm games, though it can sometimes be a little difficult to find a race, and you will rarely find a full grid in a race, which is a shame, because otherwise the online is exceptionally good. Only play the online though if you have a lot of skill, as the few people who do play online are the hardened veterans on this game; and I am yet to even finish an online race as these people are too good (and I have almost completed the Festival on Arctic Edge with very little problem, so these guys are very skilled.)
All the vehicles in the game handle just as you would expect, and the awesome slow motion crashes and a very good damage model is present on this portable Motorstorm game, with bits such as doors, hoods, bumpers, ploughs, spoilers being able to come completely off the vehicle through impacts. My only problem with the handling in this game is that the game is not as sensitive as previous Motorstorm games with crashes. This means you can be rolling around on your roof for 20 seconds and it still won't have registered you have crashed in extreme cases! Which means you will have to press select to reset yourself. This is quite a minor problem though, since in most cases, this less sensitive crashing can be a benefit rather than a drawback.
Feature-wise, this has everything Motorstorm Pacific Rift has only in the snow, and having snowmobiles and snow cats instead of the monster trucks. Arctic Edge even has the screenshot feature, where you can pause the game at any point and take a screenshot and save it onto your memory stick that instant, from any angle you choose.
Overall, Motorstorm Arctic Edge is a very good game, living up to the Motorstorm name. If you own a PSP, and you are a Motorstorm fan, or even if you are new to the series, this game is highly recommended. The graphics may not be up to the PS3 Motorstorm games, but for PSP they are very good graphics; for racers, the graphics are second only to Gran Turismo PSP.
8.5/10