MotorStorm: Arctic Edge Review
They’ve done the desert and the tropics so now the MotorStorm tour has decided to cool off and head to the Arctic. There are 100 events to rip through in such frostbitten locations like ice caves, mud bowls, gargantuan bobsleigh tracks (or should that be tubes?) and mountain passes.
The biggest problem facing the PS3 MotorStorm games is they don’t exactly ease you in gently. And if the general lack of interest for last years rock hard sequel has shown anything, it’s that the series needed to relax a little.
Apparently new developers Bigbig Studios may have agreed, as it’s obvious from the off that this time around you’ll be winning races early on and not constantly begging for a top half of the field finish.
It’s surprising to be able to report that many of the finer features from the PS3 games have made it into this superb PSP title. The healthy variety of vehicles from bikes, ATVs, rally cars, buggies and trucks are here, all equipped with boosting nitrous. While the game doesn’t feel as fast as the PS3 games, it’s not a problem as if it ran any faster you’d struggle to see the hazards ahead.
Perhaps at the cost of better looks, the tracks are just as expansive as we’re used to with multiple routes on offer. It’s a good choice of decent tracks over overworking the PSP for graphical polish.
The different routes are often more suited to different vehicle sizes. Larger, heavy vehicles for the lower routes and high jumps and ramps for the smaller, lighter ones. But if you’re a mean spirited truck driver, you can think sod it and follow those pesky bikes over the huge jump and squash them into the petrol soaked snow.
That’s the best thing about all the routes; they no longer feel exclusive to certain vehicles. This really helps to keep a three lap race fresh as you can try out different routes each time round. Naturally some are more dangerous or quicker than others and that’s half the fun. There’s so many of them you can often fall off a track and land on another one below before you’ve finished saying that nasty word at the screen.
Ice doesn’t really feel slippy, but we can settle for that as since when has driving on ice been fun? Never. Surprisingly there are dirt tracks and gravel sections aplenty in the game which breaks up any potential monotony of pure white tracks.
There are multiple depths of snow on offer, replacing the mud of previous games, with vehicles coping differently depending on their wheels or tracks.
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