Motorstorm RC is just as fun driving RC cars, with just as much lasting appeal - in other words, no so much.
Motorstorm RC's main mode of play is Festival. This single player campaign has four circuits themed after the four main Motorstorm titles: Monument Valley fashioned after the PS3 game, Pacific Rift after the second PS3 title, Arctic Edge after the PSP installment, and Apocalypse, which is the PS3's more recent Motorstorm release. Each circuit contains four tracks and four types of events. There's the standard Race, Overtake which has you overtaking a certain number of opponents in a time limit, Hot Lap that has you setting the fastest lap you can, and Drift which involves you trying to amass 5000 points by drifting in the fastest time possible.
The problem with these racing types is they're not that much fun. The game features a steering system that very closely resembles an RC car controller, so it takes a great deal of work to be able to control well. Plus, many of these events consist of brutal criteria to meet in order to obtain the best time. The slightest error can cause you to wipe out and have to restart. Hot Lap has some incredibly hard times to meet, and the drifting mechanic's learning curve is so steep, it makes the Drift events infuriating. You'll find yourself very soon admitting to yourself that the game needed more old-fashioned Race events.
The tracks themselves are designed well, since they look and feel like something you would set up in your backyard. There are a couple of problems with this, though. For one, the tracks are very short, with laps averaging 15 seconds. Secondly, the top down camera perspective isn't very complimentary for actual racing gameplay, as a lot of times you're moving so fast you can't anticipate the next turn soon enough. The game requires a lot of going around and around before you get good enough to win.
Content-wise, it's an obvious cash grab. Yes, the game offers 64 events, but with only 16 tracks, you're spending approximately three-fourths of your gameplay time racing around the same tracks again. The unlockable super car challenges are all Hot Laps, which is a shame as it would have been nice to see the speed of these vehicles used in other events. If you want more Motorstorm RC, you'll need to buy the Pro-Am expansion which released just a week after the game's initial launch with another being released shortly after. Many of the game's cars are locked and need to be purchased for .99 cents each in order to play. There are also passes that you can purchase which unlock all the areas if you are really that impatient that you can't unlock the events yourself. It's shameless.
As for the gameplay, it's pretty fun at first. You drive around the tracks watching your little car skirt around corners, hop off ramps and flip upside down when it runs over an obstacle. The more you play, though, the more you begin to grow tired of it. There's also a glaring problem with the game's auto-reset ability. It has a hard time understanding when it needs to reset you. It could reset your car in the middle of a perfect turn while other times let you continue to stay stuck off the side of the road. Plus, there's no boost ability or vehicles blowing up like in the mainstay Motorstorms, so the game lacks that sense of speed and carnage. Yes, it is a miniature version, but it looses a great deal of staying power as a result.
Motorstorm RC also has no online multi-player. Any competition lies in the form of leaderboards. If you really enjoy settings new times and sending challenges out to your friends for them to beat, you'll find some value here, but it's a pale compensation for no real-time versus. The only other modes in Motorstorm RC are Time Attack and Freeplay, which let you set new times and practice on courses with all the cars you've previous unlocked, and a sandbox area called Playground that offers little more than an area to practice the controls of the game.
The game's very well put together on an aesthetic level. The environments are nicely detailed and designed to look exactly like a track you'd take a radio-controlled vehicle on. There are beaten up boxes in Apocalypse's warehouse tracks, half-buried boats in some of the Pacific Rift's stages, snowmen and snowbanks all around Arctic Edges levels, and dust and rusted metal strewn about Monument Valley's courses. Dust, mud and snow being kicked up from your tires makes for a nice trail that follows your car along the track. The only major visual impairment is there's no perfect camera angle to select from that shows the most optimal angle to play from resulting in instances where your car becomes obstructed for a second or two when it passes under a bridge.
Motorstorm RC is also a nice sounding game. A large part of this is due to the high-pitched whir of the RC cars' engines. They sound exactly like real RC cars, and the aural experience is further enhanced by the kicking up of dirt, the sloshing of mud and the squealing of tires on pavement. Since there's no vehicle destructibility in the game, there's unfortunately no opportunities to enjoy a good explosion. There are also times where the sound becomes out of sync when you're restarting events. The music is enjoyable and sounds authentically Motorstorm with its high energy and instrumentation. The only issue with the music is that it plays continuously, even when swapping through menus and selecting new tracks, so it begins to get monotonous after a while.
At the time of this review, Motorstorm RC is free courtesy of Scion. If you are still able to download it for free, by all means do so. It's a lot of fun to play in short bursts, and is reminiscent of what racing games used to be like in the early days. Scoring the game for free also takes some of the sting out of having to purchase more tracks for the game, but no matter how you spin it, the option of paying to unlock all the events in the game is just unethical and dirty. If you missed out on the incredible deal and are now looking at paying 10 dollars for the game, don't. There's a good chance you'll either tire of it or become too frustrated with it to justify paying that much for such a simple racing game.