Motorstorm: Pacific Rift

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If you tend to buy the first MotorStorm to get yourself familiar with the game than drop this idea. As good as the original MotorStorm is, it's no comparison to its sequel. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is a great racing game, but more than just a racing game. The game was improved with even more alternative routes when racing. The graphic is excellent, and the interactions with objects such as smashing into a branch are more accurate. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is also more realistic such as water cooling off your boost, and smaller vehicles not able to go to certain routes such as deep water.

MotorStorm: Pacific Rift has about 80 races, or more. All categorized into four distinct parts of the island: Earth Zone (basic land fields), Air Zone (expect lots of jump lifts), Fire Zone (lava lands), and Water Zone (beach etc). You will find about twenty-four races in each of the four zones. Some are basic races, some timed races, and some eliminator races where racers are being eliminated while racing (you don't want to be in the back).

You will also obtain points, and gain PS3 trophies for your performances in the game. Unlike its predecessor you are able to play in split screen with your peers if you have additional controllers. One of the many extras in MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is your ability to take pictures of your race (pause, and snap). The good thing about this feature is that you'll be able to snap a picture on any angle since you'll be able to move, zoom in and out, before snapping your pictures that will all be saved in your gallery. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift also has an improved online gaming where you can text/voice/video chat, and invite your PS3 friends who also own the game.

Cons: unfortunately absent in both the first, and Pacific Rift, there are no replays of your race. Hopefully this will be present if they make a third, but this shouldn't be a reason not to buy this game.

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When the first motorstorm came out it carved its own racing type. It was one of the pioneers in physics based racing. With every track having lots of branching path, every branch suitable for a different class of vehicles.

Here they have taken it to the next level. Races are much bigger. Apart from mud you also have other obstacles for individual vehicles classes. Small vehicles will get stuck in plants and other terrestrial hazards. This time it is lot more than physics. Some people are complaining that vehicles slide more than the first one, it is intentional as it forces you to use hand brakes for a faster drift turn. Overall sense of speed has drastically gone up.

This game is still Motorstorm at heart. They have added tonnes and tonnes of extras to the game to make it feel very fresh. Things like lava tracks, water jets for faster cooling, high air jumps all add extra strategy. It is not just driving fast. You have to try out all the alternative paths and choose right one based on boost and cooling requirements.

So many behind the scene changes

Explosions will destroy the guys next to you. You can do kamikaze on cliff edges.

If you are small vehicle you can lap behind a big one to clear off the vegetation and pull off at the last second.

Water shower is available only in paths that have more terrestrial danger for balancing. Either it is a rocky path or volcanic eruption.

More and more I play, I keep finding lot more interesting tweaks.

AI is also vastly improved. If you truly race well you will win. There isn't much of rubber necking. I also think the physics respond much better compared to the first one. Jumps and slides feel lot more natural. Graphics seem to be better than the demo. I think they have tweaked the xdr lighting. Every thing looks very polished. I havent seen any crashes or hangs.

There is twice as many race tracks as the original one. There is also an extra eliminator mode. Speed events are my favorite, it is like slalom race. Where the flags appear only after you cross the current one. So it requires lot more agility than just boosting the way through. It is like the old ATV games.

After play thing for an hour or so, when I tried MS1 it was a night and day difference. The new game also loads much much faster than the old one. The vehicle selection screen is lot more slicker and avoids the double loading screen. I love the fact they have added split screen. There is nothing more fun than pushing your buddy off the cliff. Using L1/R1 as action buttons makes the game much more fun.

Hope they keep us busy with more DLCs.

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I couldn't wait to buy this game. Every trailer seemed better and better.

I played the original and wasn't too impressed: There was nothing done to incur a sense of speed in the original, and there was no split screen multiplayer. The crashes were the highlight, however.

Pacific Rift fixes both of those problems completely. They've increased the sense of speed by adding more effects and a fish-eye lens, and its a significant improvement. This time around there is split screen multiplayer for up to four players. Two would have satisfied me...

Another huge improvement are the environments. They are gorgeous, probably some of the best looking I've seen to date. You'll drive underneath waterfalls from a mile high that cover the screen in water affects and obstruct your vision, but cool of your engine, you'll jet through forests at incredible speeds, slog through valleys of mud, and pass over pits of lava on an active volcano. The environments are categorized as follows: Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The earth environments tend to place you in caverns mud, and thick forests; air tend to place you high up in the mountains where you'll get up to seven or eight seconds of airtime through unbelievable cliffs; fire will take you over active volcano landscapes that heat up your engine as a hazard; while water environments tend to place you near a beach or running rivers. Just look at the screen shots for the unbelievable scenery.

The crashes are as phenomenal as ever. In one race I played a lightweight rally car, and the last fifteen cars were either monster trucks or heavyweight mudpluggers (hummers/armored personnel carriers). The monster trucks would fight one another, and form swirling masses of destruction if they toppled over, and made for some amazing survival drive sequences. There are other races, such as bike-only races, where drivers flip each other off, taunt each other, and hit one another off of their bikes. There are so many ways to enjoy the game. If you get bored of playing a rally car and trying to speed as fast as you can, you can switch to big rig and just run people over or smash them into things. If you get bored of that, you can be a motorcycle against only monster trucks and try to survive... its up to you.

The farther you get in the singleplayer, the tougher the AI becomes. Toward the end, I found it more important to stay alive than to actually win the race, an example being the monster trucks above. The Ai will become more aggressive and smash into you. While it is at times frustrating, their aggression causes even more crashes and spontaneity.

There are eight or so difficulty levels in the singleplayer, and winning races within specified requirements earns you points and new vehicles, driver skins, and extras (such as concept art). In a singleplayer race, there are sixteen cars instead of twelve. Online mode only supports twelve though.

Online is fantastic. Online mode places you into games with other players of similar skills, or at least tries. When first starting, I found the races to be the easiest because I already completed the singleplayer before hand. There are five or so online player ranks, and the later ranks require you to place within the top three positions if you want to increase at all, so it becomes extremely difficult. At veteran difficulty, you'll actually lose ranking points if you don't place high enough, so it places every racer into their own category, which I thought was interesting and intuitive.

The replay value is very high. There's a custom game mode where you can set the cars, tracks, and time of day for yourself... something that should have been included in the original.

Out of ten points, I give MotorStorm: Pacific Rift a 9.5... the original being a 7.5 due to one type of environment, lack of speed and multiplayer options. Pacific rift fixes all of these problems, and I highly recommend you buy it if you own a PS3.

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I love racing games. I love being able to go fast, tearing up the track, and I love that when (not if) I wreck, I can almost feel the pain of it. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift does all these things, and then some. Going fast is just one part of the game, but you do literally tear the track up. Tire tracks get left in the mud and in the dirt or sand, old structures can get driven through and create new hazards for other vehicles, and, of course, the wrecks are bone crunching and make me squirm when they happen. The game takes place on an abandoned tropical island in the Pacific. Having once been populated by man, there are structures there depicting different times it has been occupied. From World War 2 era bunkers and airfield, to a lava overrun beach town, to an abandoned mountaintop observatory. The elements play havoc to your vehicle as well. Bikes and smaller vehicles will has a harder time negotiated the mud and dense brush but can make up time with there acceleration, while big rigs and Monster trucks can tackle pretty much any terrain and take abuse, but sacrifice speed over durability. Also, water and fire have an effect on the boost gauge of your chosen ride. get to close to fire and lava the boost will heat up faster, making an engine explosion more eminent, while driving through water will cool your boost down, but might hurt your speed. All in all, the game is very well made, very fun and if you're a racing fan with a PS3, this is certainly a game to pick up.

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Motorstorm is a great arcade game. In my opinion it is offroad ACTION, and less of a racer. I know ACTION doesn't seem befitting of a game in which you drive, but there are too many problems to call it a real racer. Unless you are a big rig or a Monster truck, it feels as if the environment, the other vehicles, and YOUR OWN VEHICLE are all stacked up against you (not in the strategic good way). Let me bring you to a better understanding..........

The environments are beautiful and in motion they're the best graphics I've seen besides Gran Turismo 5. Littered throughout the environments are water, ramps, and fire. Fire/lava is a universal hazard to be avoided by all, water cools your engine, but sometimes deep water can swallow up an ATV/bike. I'm sure you know this stuff. Also sprinkled throughout the environments are rocks. BIG and small. These rocks are obviously placed there as a fun little obstacle, but they have the potential to flip over your vehicle if you roll over it on one side. There are also changes in elevation and tiny hills that will flip over any vehicle. This makes it very hard to master the course for reasons I will further explain. Each con of this game branches out into another con unfortunately.

These rocks are even more of a hazard when considering the OTHER RACERS. You'll be battered and beaten by larger vehicles, and sometimes even smaller ones. At times they even sacrifice their own vehicles to make sure you mess up. If you even TAP a monster truck's wheels or a big rig, the game will go into the slow mo crash sequence (that's why I never use a bike). The damage system while brilliant and extremely detailed is overly exaggerated. I had a rollover (from one of the rocks) while I was going pretty slow and my wheels popped off and all of the paneling and bumpers flew everywhere as well. If you roll over at all for any reason YOUR TIRES WILL FALL OFF. I dunno why, but almost every time I crash my tires fly off. 90% of the time the crash will be in slow mo, and oddly there is an explosion sound effect as if your engine blew up. Its EXTREMELY cool when you first buy the game, but after a month, it gets annoying. I wish there was an option to turn off the slow motion crash "movies." The amount of times you'll crash in the first day will be in the hundreds, I guarantee it. Still to this day, I strongly believe that the crash physics are the best I have EVER SEEN. Nothing else comes close albeit hugely exaggerated. Your car will look like a crushed beer can after certain crashes.

Which comes to my third con, YOUR VEHICLE. I've been playing Motorstorm for a good month now, and most of the time I crashed, I'd say 70 percent of the time is because of the vehicle's handling. I know this is an offroad game, but the vehicles slide around a lot more than they should. The guy even said it in the IGN review. They should call this game slidestorm. Seriously, you will slide all over the place and flip over easily while trying to avoid the Monster trucks and Big Rigs mowing you down. What's worse is that in a buggy you don't feel grounded. You feel like you're just going to fly into the air even if you go too fast. Simply racing becomes a burden, which is why many played the demo and just dismissed it as a stupid arcade racer. I can see why they did though unfortunately.

You never feel completely safe if you're not in a Big Rig or Monster truck. Even the Monster truck feels like paper when driving next to a big rig. The tracks offer many paths for you to take advantage of your vehicle's strengths, but all of this flies out the window after experiencing the "rubber-banding" that everyone was talking about. I've heard the term "rubber-banding" in almost every professional review I've come across, and believe them.....ITS TRUE. On lvl 8 (which I don't believe I'll ever be able to beat BTW) driving effectively becomes impossible. You'll turbo past a monster truck just to see it right behind you 3 seconds later. Its a broken difficulty and so brutally hard that I stopped trying. If I crash in first place, I'll remain in at most 4th for the remainder of the race. In short, you have to drive perfect with all the the listed problems above. Please. Its near impossible!

There is also no variety to the sounds for the vehicles. There are in total 8 engine sounds. 1 for EACH ENTIRE CLASS (atv, bike, bugg, big rig). My dirtbike sounded the same as by Harley-type motorcycle. Thst's just.......bad.......and sad.

A good side to this game is being able to pick it up every now and then put it on medium difficulty, choose a track and time of day, sit back, and look at the beautiful graphics as you drive. On the harder difficulties the game becomes unplayable and is no fun at all for me. I'll admit, I got this because of my long wait for the reason I bought my PS3. Gran Turismo 5.

One other HUGE asset to this game is eliminator mode. The true form of the game comes out in eliminator. You are basically fighting for your life to not be in last place as all of the cars around you are blowing up and crashing in the process of avoiding the dreaded last place. In this mode every 15 or so seconds the person in last place blows up. As you play this mode, you really get the feel for the "Lunatics" atmosphere the developers were trying to get across. The sense of urgency and the rush of adrenaline you get from this single mode really show the game's true colors................and wasted potential. I actually find this mode and the speed events (time trials) more strategic and fun than actually racing. Maybe its too many cars on the track, I dunno.

I've juggled with the possibility that there are far too many cars on the track at once and its TOO MUCH CHAOS. There should be only 7 or 8 cars on a track not 12. The graphics on the vehicle models are OUTSTANDING. FEEL FREE TO ASK ANYTHING ABUT THE GAME THAT WASN'T ADDRESSED IN MY REVIEW. ANYTHING! Thank you for reading my review. PSN: I-Am-theIRONMAN