The very first PS3 game I ever played was Motorstorm. It wasn’t my PS3 and it wasn’t my game, but to the average computer games player such as myself, it was a bit of a special occasion.
I remember thinking “These controls are weird. Why is R2 accelerate? Why isn’t it X? This motion-sensing jazz confuses and infuriates me”. But it was fun, and, slightly less importantly, it was gorgeous. Like the pizza on the front page of the takeaway menu or my hair after I’ve washed and dried it, I could stare at it all day.
Suffice to say, these days I’ve got my own copy of it, and now I can stare at it whenever I want, providing someone else isn’t using the TV and/or my eyes feel like they’re about to blow up.
Anyway, the game. Imagine Sunday’s episode of Top Gear when they’re driving through the salt plains and Clarkson/May are both having their shit ruined in the form of dust, set it in an American desert with Mesas and mud pools, add a soundtrack that’s got Wolfmother on it and you’re halfway there. Only except of the craptacular cars the Top Gear guys were driving, you get bikes, ATVs, Sports Cars, trucks and lorries that actually work.
And you will enjoy belting around Monument Valley, USA in a dune buggy, often exploding from using the boost too often, ir falling of a cliff because you misjudged a corner. It’s especially funny when you’re on a bike and you fall off, either smacking your head on the ground and rolling (by which I mean flailing like a loonatic) for 20 feet or meeting a messy but temporary end at the huge rubber wheels of a pursuing Big Rig, or both.
And then it gets to a point around the 18th race when it all goes a bit tits-up, difficulty wise. Whereas it may have taken about 3 attempts - tops - to pass a seemingly fiendish stage, now all it takes is a single tap into a lone tree to make you come last in an otherwise perfect lap. You ain’t in levels 1-2 now, son - this is hard. It doesn’t feel unfair - it feels like the game actually hates you. Not the kind of unjustified, pointless hate that females feel for people they’ve never met, but the kind of hate that consumes a bloke you beat at darts in the pub once, so he torched your house with your family in it. At the same time, it’s playing some crap Kings of Leon song that was thankfully never commercially released. Mocking. Laughing.
You bastard.
8/10
