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According to Sony Executive Vice President Phil Harrison, MotorStorm is the latest entry in the “killer app” rally for the PlayStation 3. And while the game may look very good, seemingly taking full advantage of the platform’s powerful graphics technology, the lack of any real interesting gameplay elements or modes different than just your basic races makes for an overall “who cares” sensation after playing the game? Killer app? No way. Killer rental is more like it.

Turning Man

Motorstorm is set at a huge outdoor festival in monument valley Utah, where apparently hundreds of thousands of racers converge to pit their knobby tired go-karts against one another, tearing up the pristine ecosystem in the process. Somewhere a virtual Al Gore is crying. If the opening cinematic is to believed, you’ll get to do all kinds of fun stuff at this Burning Man for cars”, like go off twisty jumps, drift race around tight figure-eight courses and bas jump off cliffs with a burning flare strapped to your foot. But alas, you get to do none of this, you only get to do standard races on eight different tracks. No career mode, no time trials, nothing.

And worst of all, you’ll usually be forced to drive one specific class of the seven vehicle types – motorcycles, ATV’s, dune buggies, rally cars, racing trucks, mudders or semis – on each of the eight tracks. Yes there are only eight tracks, and while they’re full of shortcuts and varying routes, not to mention a ton of track side details, the variety wears pretty thin after awhile. It seems like you keep racing the same race again and again. Sure, there’s some strategy to which routes you should take with which vehicle, and knocking bike riders off with a whack of your backhand a la road rash is always a good time, you’ll discover almost everything there is to discover in a singe sitting.

Good out of the gate

But before the game gets boring, when you’re first marveling at the amazingly crisp graphics, advanced lighting engine and super detailed physics and destruction engines, MotorStorm is actually fun for awhile. Sure, it looks nothing like the original demo footage from a couple E3’s back, where you had to wiper thick gooey mud from your windshield, and the environments were far more destructible. But it does look better than anything we’ve seen on the PS3 so far. And tearing around in the mud, which does deform with real-time ruts, is fun for a bit.

But then the game gets really hard. Opponent A.I. is dialed way up, resulting in head-hunting enemies who will smash you into a wall or over a cliff just for fun, so that winning races on the higher levels is more a matter of luck than skill. But then again, you’ll have already raced all the tracks with most of the vehicles by that point, so really, what’s the point?

In need of a tune up

So many things could have been added to MotorStorm to increase its appeal. Being able to tune your vehicles or choose things like tire types. Customizable paint jobs would have been fun. Simply a few more game types would have gone a long way towards making MotorStorm easy to recommend. At least they included multiplayer, for whatever that’s worth. But really all we can do is recommend you rent it for a weekend to show off your PS3 and sweet big screen plasma. After that, you’ll really just want to move on with your life.

Article by: Tom Price
Video produced by: Paul Bonanno