Review: MotorStorm: Apocalypse

A large archway has two fundamental components which allow it to stand firmly, a solid foundation and the Keystone. While the arch grows upward from the foundation, it is the Keystone at the zenith whose force cascades downward, allowing it to support it's own weight. Remove either one of these elements and integrity of the structure suffers. The arch becomes unsound, and it either buckles or sinks.

In a way MotorStorm: Apocalypse is like this unstable archway. Though it is built upon a solid foundation, it is the Keystone which seems to have been improperly installed. And though the game never completely collapses, there is some buckling to be found in what would otherwise be a solid structure.

MotorStorm: Apocalypse (PS3)
Developer: Evolution Studios
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Release date: May 03, 2011 (North America)

To put it simply MotorStorm: Apocalypse is it's own worst enemy. It's a man who puts on cologne in an attempt to attract women in a club, but then puts on so much that he ends up scaring them all away. He may be a great man, a fine upstanding American citizen, but his cologne is so pungent that it ends up clouding much of what is good about him. In the same way, Motorstorm is a great game, a fine game, one of the best racers I've ever played. The problem is, before going out to the club Mr. MotorStorm splashed on so much Apocalypse that it hinders much of what was great about him in the first place.

And there is a lot of apocalypse to be had.

The game features many of the same racing mechanics as Pacific Rift but instead of racing on tropical islands, or mud-bogged side trails, the action as been moved to a city experiencing all sorts of natural disasters and literally being destroyed in front of you. If you were to pay attention to the story at all you would find that you're actually part of a semi-Mad Max type of racing troupe who have come to this city during the evacuation simply to have a chance at racing on some of the particular terrain that only the apocalypse could provide. As you can imagine, the story is as nonsensical as it is unnecessary, and I'm of the firm belief that racing fans have no need of a story to put them in the moment, they only need good driving on good tracks. The story mode would have been sufficient if you simply hit start and this appeared on the screen:

“So you're gonna race now but be careful, everything is totally fucked up and if you don't watch out some goddamned building is going to fall on you. Seriously. It's that bad. So don't fuck up, OK? Good...yeah that’s about it...go race ya' dick!”

Then you would race the tracks in consecutive order. Unfortunately, the developers have replaced my well-crafted exposition with a series of cartoon cut-scenes which attempt to spin an overly elaborate yarn concerning your trials and tribulations, but really act as nothing more than extra loading screens as you move to the next race. The story itself seems so painfully shoehorned in that I wouldn't be surprised if one of the creators had an artist as a significant other who wouldn't stop pestering them with “Can I put my art in your game?” until they finally relented and found some way, no matter how gratuitous, to put it in. Luckily, since you don't get any experience points or gain any ranks for doing the story mode there is absolutely no real reason to play it at all.

Instead, all experience points and ranks are acquired through the online portion of the game. I hope you like racing against real people because that's the only way you're ever going to be able to unlock more vehicles or parts to use in the vehicle customization screen. Luckily, I do enjoy this so I found the online portion of the game extremely well done, very stable, and quite fun to play. Points are gained by a variety of in-race activities such as drifting, ramming, how many other players you beat and even by just finishing the race. I found that even doing poorly in a race guaranteed some experience which is useful for players still getting the feel for the controls and the tracks themselves. When you do start gaining ranks you'll acquire more parts to put on your vehicles in a fairly robust vehicle customization area. I'll concede that I spent more time than I would like to admit making my car into a post-apocalytic dragster. The customizations are strictly aesthetic in nature but go a long way to giving your driver some online personality.  The next time you're racing against a black dragster with German millitary stickers, red flames, and police lights - that will be me.

Each player can also choose a series of three Perks to use while driving which offer different passive abilties such as more ramming damage, taking less ramming damage, faster acceleration, etc. And even though I found these to be useful I never found them to be unbalanced. There is no one perk which acts as a game breaker and everyone, even at level one, starts out with three and then can choose different ones as they increase their levels. The rubber-banding in online play does sometimes seem excessive, however, and there will be times when you pass someone who has just wrecked only to find them being respawned in front of you.

When you finally do get to the racing you'll find that the foundations of MotorStorm have, for the most part, remained the same. You can still use your boost, your boost can still overheat, and you can use water puddles or water barrels throughout the track to aid in cooling yourself down. Ramming comes in handy and wrecking someone is always a thrill. The cars feel appropriately heavy, yet handle well in almost any given situation.

The big differences come from the tracks and how these effect the overall feel of the game. This is where the apocalypse portion of the game comes on, the Keystone, and it really comes on strong. Because you are now in a city which is crumbling around you there is a lot more stuff strewn around the tracks this time around. Compound that with many more tight, or180 degree, turns and you find that you're playing a MotorStorm which is decidedly much slower than past incarnations of the series. Often times it feels more like a slower off-road racing game than the white-knuckled free-running feel that Pacific Rift offered. Apocalypse also severely lacks those “Oh God” moments. Those moments where you hit the jump, miss your landing mark but land on a part of the track which is 2-3 levels below where you started – and you never slow down once. In Apocalypse you miss your landing mark, hit something and explode. Everything explodes. It's the APOCALYPSE!

Furthermore, there will be many times where you'll be wrecked by mere cracks in the road or random debris that you couldn’t even see. It becomes enormously frustrating, especially at high tension moments where you're just barely holding onto first place, and feels like the racing equivalent of getting cheap-shotted by the AI from across the map in a first-person shooter. There are other moments when you're racing through buildings without any idea of what is breakable and what is not, and even though I understand that the creation of a action movie type of dynamic was probably the intent, it truly comes at the detriment of the thing which should have been first and foremost in a racer. The racing.

There are some tracks, however, which are laid out well and provide a perfect mixture of speed and hair raising destruction. These tracks in particular lead to some great racing moments that have elicited cheers from me as I crossed the finish line mere milli-seconds away from losing first. When the game shines, it shines brighter than almost any racer out there, which is why when it falters it seems to do so in the worst way possible. Racing toward the finish line in first position only to be wrecked by an errant piece of geometry feels like getting punched in the face during an orgasm.

It's unfortunate that this amalgamation of deficiencies takes such a heavy toll on the game, but it's simply impossible for the greatest tendencies of MotorStorm to shine when the entire structure of the game has been hindered by the very theme which defines it. If you can get over a MotorStorm with a different feeling, and can memorize the location of some obtuse obstacles, then I would surely recommend Apocalypse to you. If you, however, prefer the faster, speedier MotorStorm, and don't have a penchant for apocalyptic ambiance, then you might be better off sticking to Pacific Rift.

Score: 75%
(70%-79%: A solid title that has a few major issues)