Unique racer that has gorgeous track designs and a great career mode, but is let down by a few very important aspects.
1. A sense of speed
2. Vehicle handling that you can master and adds satisfaction to the game
3. Good and varied vehicle design
4. Good and varied track design
Firstly, there are many things that Motorstorm on the PSP does right. The tracks are very well designed, with multiple routes suited to different types of vehicle. The tracks vary in difficulty and terrain, from muddy dirt tracks to deep snow drifts and glaciers. Each course has it's fair share of insane jumps, high speed banked turns, and suicidal sheer drops, making this game wildly different to your standard circuit racer.
Next there is the Vehicles you can choose from, almost adding a strategic element to the game. You can choose the standard buggy, which is easy to drive, but lacks straight line speed, the motorbike, which is fast, but looses time in slippery sharp turns, the rally car, the fastest vehicle in the game, but requires more skill to drive, the trucks, which lack fast acceleration, but can plow the smaller vehicles out of the way. You can also drive snowmobiles, quad bikes and snowcats (like tanks with snow plows).
The game is very well presented, with an excellent menu system, intuitive career (festival) mode and a huge array of unlockables. The soundtrack is one of the best aspects of the game, with adrenaline pumping songs from the likes of Pendulum, The Prodigy and Queens of the Stone Age and Motorhead.
The disappointment starts when you actually start driving...
I would liken the way the vehicles handle in this game, to trying to control a water skier being towed behind a boat. When you steer right, the car moves to the left hand side of the screen, and the body of the car rolls. It is hard to feel any interaction between the car and the road. Very well, you say, but I don't care if the handling isn't realistic. But I would say the handling of the vehicles in this game isn't even worthy of an arcade racer.
Then theres the sense of speed. The game has a sense of speed, but you are always left wanting more. When you're going flat out and press the boost button, you expect a sudden surge of speed, like in burnout or need for speed. However All the boos button is motorstorm seems to do is add more motion blur around the edge of the screen and make your car run wider in the corners. I swear there is very little speed given.
The third driving game rule this game breaks is in the vehicle design. Sure the choice of vehicle is varied, but you only get three vehicles in each class, and the looks of said vehicles is appalling. I would describe most of them as chunky and unimaginative. For instance, the third rally car you get, and the fastest is hideously ugly. Looks like a Daewoo thats been sat on. Most of the paint jobs are gawdy.
However, at it's heart this is a fun and unique racing game with great track design and gameplay, supported with a variety of game modes and an excellent soundtrack. This outweighs the negatives making it an excellent addition to your PSP game library.