Plenty of outrageous and over-the-top stunts make Pure a tricked-out thrill ride!
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GAMEPLAY - 3/5
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The concept behind Pure is a simple yet unique gameplay feature, that offers plenty of thrills. While racing, you'll be able to show off many tricks utilising your quad-bike, which are split out into a few necessary categories. There's the basic type of tricks, which are simple, and not overly challenging, manoeuvres. When your boost meter at the bottom hits a certain point, you'll then be able to pull off intermediate tricks, which are slightly more difficult, and require a decent amount of height to complete fully. If you complete an intermediate stunt, the bar raises more quickly, but you are still able to pull off less challenging stunts, but for a minor spurt of boost power. The next step up, are expert tricks. These complicated tricks demand a much greater effort to accomplish, but are really well worth nailing, as it adds a big amount of juice to your meter. With this supply of boost, your boost/trick meter is full, and when its full, you are able to attempt a special trick. Special tricks really are something special, and the animations performed need serious amounts of air to ultimately try and pull, and are quite simply impossible to do in the real world. But this is a game, and for what its worth, these unique tricks are awesome to watch, and satisfying if you complete it without dismounting. From back flips to swirling tornado animations, each one is worth attempting, and each rider, has their own set of cool tricks. Each track has a specific point to carry out the special tricks, as they require a huge effort and amount of time to complete. If you crash, your entire bar is reset, and you'll need to start over. Depending on the trick you are trying to showcase, it depletes your meter accordingly to the difficulty of the trick, so just make sure your in the right situation to attempt it, before you try something complicated.
The game has a Trick-System that monitors what kind of tricks the player has been showing off. If the player keeps using the same trick, the tricks become 'stale', but if you keep pulling off new tricks, you get 'fresh' results and larger quantities of boost are added to the gauge. But this meter is also a boost meter, like I've mentioned above. For short periods of time you can use boost to get short bursts of speed to pass over racers, but you have to be careful how much you use, otherwise you'll drain the whole meter. Equally balancing your tricks and boosting wisely is something that comes with practice, and trying to maintain your balance on your quad-bike is also something necessary to win, otherwise you'll not only diminish your bar, but your race position standing which could ultimately lose you the race.
There are 3 different event types - Race; which is the most frequent encountered event, and the standard 3 laps of the course to try and establish a respectable result. Freestyle; An event where you must keep stringing together trick combos before you run out of gas, and the player with the highest points wins the event. And finally Sprint; A short circuit race which consists of 5 laps, and many hard turns, and very few places to get air to perform tricks. The best is by far the standard race, but the others pop up in the World Tour mode, and mix things up with some minimal variety. World Tour mode takes you to all sorts of locations from around the world, with lots of track variety. A cool edition is the ability to customize your ATV, and with the points you gain from winning races, you unlock more garage slots for other vehicles which can be created to your liking and use to your preferred race event type. You can completely do overhauls on your quad-bikes, change colours, give it a name, and use new equipment to improve its overall skill potential. Examples of parts that can be acquired include new upgraded engines, which increases your max speed, or various wheel axis to increase the handling of your vehicle. The rewards are crucial to your future success, and advance in the world tour, and you'll unlock slightly harder tracks, and will need to fully be aware of your opponents if you want to establish yourself as a well earned victor of events. Uneven difficulty can cause moments of frustration though, as one minute you could be dominating a race, and then from out of nowhere other drivers pass you, despite you racing to your best, and progressing at speed without single crashes. Whilst other times you might crash several times but still go on to win the race.
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GRAPHICS - 4/5
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The graphics are great, and thanks to detailed and recognisable monuments in the surroundings, you'll have some decent guesses to your present location for a certain event. The tracks are constructed well, and give you plenty of opportunities to perform all sorts of stylish tricks. Dirt kicks up realistically as you speed across the gravel at a speedy pace, and each trick is smoothly animated to give you a sense of realism when performing them at alarming speed. If you slowed down to carefully examine your surroundings, its easy to note that textures aren't brilliant, and the objects around you aren't stunning to look at, but since you'll be travelling past these minor blemishes at such a fast rate, you'll barely take notice, or consider caring.
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SOUND - 3/5
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Pure's soundtrack features a wide variety of new artists ranging from house and electronic to hip-hop and rock, but with the menus exclusively playing rock music, and even though the music isn't particularly brilliant, its suitable for Pure. The presentational aspects sound cool and rewarding, especially when nailing a special trick, which goes for the most part of Pure, when you earn a new accessory to add to your vehicle, or unlock the next track to participate in, and challenge for 1st place. The sound effects of the quad-bike skidding around corners, and landing jumps, is also noticeably effective, and impressive.
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CONTROLS - 3/5
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Because of the depth of the trick system, it was difficult to prevent some awkward button presses, and that goes for the majority of tricks available to execute. You'll need to move the left analog stick in a direction, even diagonal, and press the appropriate button, either circle, square or triangle, to carry out the desired trick. But acting quickly can sometimes cause your landing to go adrift, as your focused on accomplishing the right move before you land. In particular, this affects the special trick, which requires you to press 3 buttons simultaneously, and in order to prevent repetition of the same move, you'll be needing to move the analog stick in all sorts of unusual positions, which can cause you to stutter, and inevitably fail the trick.
The vehicle handling is nice and easy, and turning corners doesn't require much effort, and the forgiving physics can keep you balanced on your quad, even if your sure you'll fall off.
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ATMOSPHERE - 2/5
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While the visually impressive environments capture your eye, there isn't much of a racing atmosphere established. You'll pick up a reasonable sense of speed and height when hitting the big dirt ramps, but hardly any of your victories will feel satisfying, as a dull crowd around the track don't make much effort to encourage you on. Its nothing particularly important, and most likely won't take fun out of the gameplay, but it is evident on all of the tracks.
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ENEMY AI - 2/5
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Your opposing racers are a challenge to beat, and at the later stages of the World Tour mode can cause heaps of frustration because of their actions during the race. They'll crash, but it doesn't take them that long to get into the race, whilst if you dismount, you'll seemingly struggle to keep pace with everyone, and be solely performing tricks to use as boost to attempt to catch up.
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LENGTH - 4/5
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Pure lasts for a good length of time if you take your time in World Tour mode, and slow the pace of things by tuning your rides, and creating new additions to add to your collection in the garage. Depending how easy you find it, you may find yourself coming to a halt before the end of the tour. But there is easily 12 hours worth of solid racing action to be had in Pure.
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REPLAY VALUE - 2/5
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After you're done with the World Tour, there isn't much things to do apart from test your skills online against other Pure fans. Replaying the world tour will grant you access to customize your ATVs again, and you could vary up there designs to find new ways to perform better than your previous session on the tracks. But the main reason to replay the events is to try out some of the other characters who you didn't try out previously. Afterall, Pure is all about testing the limits of realism, and the outrageous stunts that can be executed send a real rush of enjoyment, and pulling them off without crashing will provide even more of a thrill to the already adrenaline rush you got from being 100 metres up on a sheer drop back to reality.
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OVERALL SUMMARY - 8/10
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Good Points: Good track variety, Easy vehicle handling, Lots of outrageous over-the-top stunts to perform, Fast-paced racing and landing stunts give an adrenaline rush, Nice graphics, Ability to fully customize ATVs from scratch.
Bad Points: Tricky controls, Lacks an engaging atmosphere, Challenging opposing AI.