A racing game thats fun but gets a bit too hard eventually
Right, so Pacific Rift is all about off-road racing. The story is that mankind found an island, with almost all possible geographical features and the race organisers carved out some crazy tracks for us to race on! There are eight types of vehicles : Bikes, ATVs, Buggies, Rally Cars, Racing Trucks, Mudpluggers, Big Rigs and Monster Trucks. You have the ability to unlock different models of each of these as you play on and even change the paint jobs. The models look and feel great. However, the vehicles handle so drastically different from each other that its really tough to master all of them, so, you'll find yourself preferring one or two according to your play style. There is a Festival going on the island in which a track is chosen, SOME vehicle choices are given to you and you HAVE to place at least 3rd to proceed with the game. This makes the game hard if you get a vehicle you suck at and cant even come close to 3rd place. As you race you earn points which are used to up your rank. 3rd place is 50 points, 2nd is 75 and 1st is 100.
All this is well and good until you reach about rank 5 when things start to get really tough. You'll find that the computer cheats and has an unfair advantage over you. For e.g. in one race i was using a rally car at full boost full speed, which is supposed to be that fastest in the game and at rank 5, then suddenly i see that a big rig crosses me and gets ahead easily! And, when you yourself are playing a big rig, its actually almost impossible to WIN as most cars just cross you as if you were riding a bicycle. Also at the start of a race, the computer cars just race ahead so fast as if they had 10 times your acceleration. But this only happens on the higher difficulty levels.
There's also no speedometer which is rather odd. You accelerate with R2 and brake/reverse with L2 which really feels as if you are pressing the things in real. The Earth, Air, Fire and Water zones are nicely differentiated and all look great. There are 16 tracks in all. The eliminator and speed modes of races also tend to be hard. For e.g. in eliminator there is absolutely no scope of crashing. There is also online which is pretty nice and will keep ypu coming back for more.
All in all, Pacific Rift is a good game, and if you have a PS3 you should definitely give it a try.