MotorStorm™ for PlayStation 3

Motorstorm is strangely one of the best racing games I've played, though that's not saying much. I've played a ton. I most prefer the arcade style point-based ones like Split/Second and Burnout, but last year I got into Dirt and I even bought Grand Turismo 3 which offered a free racing wheel which in retrospect sucked. I'm not really a car afficianado so much as I want to play a good game, so this cuts out a lot of these lesser racing games.

Motorstorm is a great game. It does a ton of things right. For one thing, the single player race mode is long, but not too long. A lot of these 100-hour racing games reuse the same tracks with the same vehicles over and over, but not this one. What's so good about the gameplay is just the engine it runs on. The cars have great traction on the dirt roads and it's thrilling to finish a race and explode over the finish line. All you do is accellerate and break. You can boost, but if you boost too much, you do the aforementioned exploding, which feels extremely satisfying when it's over the finish line since if your charred corpse crosses the finish line you still win.

Graphically, the game looks great. It's all dirt roads with different traction and rocks, with what looks like bloom lighting (or its counterpart) in full effect. The vehicles feel like they've got weight to them, and you get a lot. There are all kinds. Trucks, rally cars, motorcycles, buggies and et cetera. They all have advantages and disadvantages but you can win any race with any car it seems. The bigger cars can smash through barricades with the smaller ones being typically faster. The motorcycles crash from even a tap but have the benefit of letting you take higher paths that cars can't ride on. If you take the wrong path, you crash. There are many split paths on the courses and it can be confusing to navigate. The game arranges the stages in such a way that they only occasionally feel repetitive, it seems the layouts change based on barricades. Honestly, though, it's hard to tell.

The audio is great. The cars sound good but the soundtrack itself is just awesome. It's a pure rock soundtrack, with even the less rock songs still sounding like rock. And not generic rock, but alt rock. They didn't just put a Queens of the Stone Age song on here, but a less popular one, Medication. Even the weaker tracks like the Slipknot song are cool. There are one or two bad ones, but at least the game had the balls not to throw three or four horrid rap songs on here to mess up the vibe of the game.

You finish races to get cars and tickets and rack up total points for the whole game. When that's done you can play online. It's not much, but the single player races can take twenty hours to complete unless you're good enough to get first place every time. Some of the races are pretty long and unlike in other racing games it doesn't seem there's an artificial way of making sure you don't steal the lead and run with it. The AI seems genuinely to be trying to finish the race so if you get far ahead, you'll stay far ahead unless you burn out and screw up. If you crash it's not a big deal, you can still win the race. In fact some times it's better to stay around third or fourth place and then shoot ahead for the last lap because of how long the races can be.

In the end this is a great game. You have to pay attention to the course or you'll screw up because of the branching paths and such, and the vehicles all have different tractions on different surfaces, lending to a strange level of depth for a racing game. It's a lot of fun and well worth picking up at a budge price now.